Behind almost every large cyber fraud recovered by Indian police lies a quieter, more mundane crime: someone handing over their bank passbook for a small sum of cash. Mumbai Police have exposed exactly that mechanism, arresting three alleged agents accused of running an interstate network that converted financially struggling individuals into unwitting conduits for laundered fraud money, with transactions worth approximately ₹25.45 crore traced through the racket within just six to eight weeks.
The arrests, made outside Sandhurst Road Railway Station on 20 August, name Nikhil Kamalkumar Jaswani, Rahul Shyamlal Parwani and Jay Biharilal Teerthani, all residents of Madhya Pradesh in their twenties and early thirties. All three have been remanded to judicial custody, while police continue searching for five further suspects believed linked to the operation.
Recruiting Desperation, Selling Identity
According to investigators, the accused specifically targeted people in urgent need of money, offering modest financial incentives in exchange for opening bank accounts in their own names. Once the accounts were active, the agents allegedly collected the account holders’ passbooks, debit cards, chequebooks and SIM cards, effectively converting each recruit’s identity into what police describe as a ready-made mule account kit.
This recruitment pattern mirrors a trend the Reserve Bank of India has flagged nationally, wherein money mules are typically drawn in through social media, messaging platforms and even informal recruitment channels promising easy income. The Mumbai case adds a specific local variant, with the promise of returns tied to online gaming, cricket betting and casino platforms used as bait for financially vulnerable recruits.
Police have so far identified 110 bank accounts connected to the network, with detailed banking information obtained for 17 of them. Examination of just these 17 accounts revealed the ₹25.45 crore in transactions, a figure investigators expect to grow substantially as records for the remaining accounts are analysed.
A Node in a Much Larger National Network
The Mumbai racket is not an isolated case but a visible fragment of a problem that has become one of Indian law enforcement’s most pressing challenges. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre had flagged more than 2.47 million Layer-1 mule accounts nationally by early 2026, and separate government data places the figure at 27.37 lakh accounts identified through the I4C’s Suspect Registry as of January this year, helping block transactions worth over ₹9,518 crore. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has publicly described mule accounts as among the biggest obstacles to curbing cybercrime.
Investigators have already linked the Mumbai accounts to at least 38 registered cybercrime cases spread across eleven states, including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal. That geographic spread is characteristic of how mule networks now operate, distributing stolen funds across large clusters of accounts specifically to frustrate the cross-platform tracing that any single state police force can manage alone.
Widening the Net Beyond the Original Arrests
The seizure list from the Mumbai operation offers a sense of the network’s physical footprint, with police recovering 42 passbooks, 70 debit cards, 36 SIM cards, 23 mobile phones, three laptops, a tablet and twelve complete account kits, alongside a vehicle used in the operation. The total value of seized property has been estimated at around ₹50 lakh.
Three women who allegedly worked as sub-agents within the network were also questioned and served notices under Section 35(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, directing them to cooperate with the ongoing investigation. Police have since expanded their inquiry into Govandi, Mankhurd, Dongri, Belapur, Panvel and Dharashiv, suspecting that additional intermediaries and account holders remain unidentified.
The case has been registered at Dongri Police Station under relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act. Investigators say their immediate priority is tracing the source and eventual destination of the ₹25.45 crore already confirmed, even as they work to map the network’s full extent across the seventeen accounts examined so far and the ninety-three still under scrutiny.
