A cybercrime network allegedly used bank accounts opened or controlled in villagers’ names to move more than ₹35 lakh linked to online frauds across India, Balangir Police have found.
Four people have been arrested after an investigation by the Balangir Cyber Crime and Economic Offences Police Station. Police also seized 22 cheque books, 25 bank passbooks, 10 debit cards and five mobile phones during the operation.
Reports identify the arrested accused as Prakash Sharma alias Chatnu and Sunny Barve from Raipur in Chhattisgarh, and Prasanna Kumar Nag and Jubaraj Deep from Balangir district. OMMCOM News gives shortened or different renderings for two of those names.
The case has opened another window into the infrastructure behind India’s booming cyber-fraud economy. The people who actually speak to victims are often only one layer of the operation. Behind them are networks supplying bank accounts, SIM cards and channels for moving stolen money.
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Villagers’ bank accounts allegedly became fraud pipelines
According to police accounts cited by local media, the network operated partly from Raipur and allegedly arranged mule bank accounts in the names of other people. Some account holders were allegedly paid commissions for allowing their accounts to be used.
The Balangir case was registered on September 4 at the Cyber Crime and Economic Offences Police Station. A second report said the investigation began after inputs from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, or I4C, highlighted accounts connected with cybercrime complaints from different parts of the country.
Investigators have so far traced transactions exceeding ₹35 lakh through the suspected network.
The accounts were allegedly linked to proceeds from several kinds of cyber fraud, including fake investment schemes, digital-arrest scams, OLX-related fraud and malicious APK scams. Police are now trying to reconstruct the wider money trail and identify where the funds ultimately went.
Several alleged associates remain under investigation. Police have named Aditya Dubey among those they are trying to trace, while local reports indicate that other suspected members escaped or remain outside custody.
What exactly is a mule bank account?
A mule account is an ordinary bank account that criminals use to receive or transfer money obtained from victims.
Think of it as a temporary transit point. A victim may send ₹2 lakh to what appears to be one person’s legitimate savings account. That money can then be split, transferred through several other accounts or withdrawn before investigators or banks can freeze it.
The account holder may be part of the fraud, may have rented or sold access to the account, or may sometimes have been misled into handing over control.
This layer is important because it separates the scammer who contacts the victim from the person ultimately controlling the proceeds. Moving funds through several accounts makes the trail harder to follow and gives organised networks time to cash out.
Police also alleged that members of the Balangir network used online identities such as “Kalki”, “Avatar”, “Ravan” and “Joker” and relied on virtual SIM-based WhatsApp accounts. Such services can complicate identification because the communication account may not be tied in the usual way to a conventional physical SIM registered locally.
Odisha has already arrested hundreds in mule-account crackdown
The Balangir arrests are not an isolated case.
Odisha Police launched Operation Cyber Kavach earlier this year to target mule accounts, fake SIMs and the financial infrastructure supporting online fraud. The state’s official police press-note archive records repeated operations and arrests under the campaign.
By March 2026, Odisha Police said it had verified 39,714 suspected mule accounts during the operation and arrested 379 people. Of those arrests, 349 were linked to mule accounts, while others involved fake SIMs, ATM withdrawals and cheque-related activity.
The scale shows why investigators are increasingly targeting the payment system around cybercrime instead of focusing only on the person who makes the fraudulent phone call.
A similar network surfaced in Indore this month, where police found that access to one bank account had allegedly been sold for ₹2,000, resold for ₹5,000 and then again for ₹10,000 before being linked to cyber-fraud cases in Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
In another Indore case, investigators linked a mule account to complaints across 15 states and transactions estimated at ₹1.5 crore.
The Balangir investigation is now moving upward through the chain. Police say the larger picture — including the total transactions and people controlling the network — may become clearer after the remaining suspects are located.
What this means for you: Never hand over your bank account, debit card, cheque book, mobile number or online-banking access in return for a commission. If someone wants to “rent” your account, your name could end up attached to money stolen from cyber-fraud victims.
The420 Insight: Cybercrime increasingly depends on ordinary bank accounts as much as sophisticated technology. Cracking mule-account networks can choke the flow of stolen money even when the scam callers themselves operate from another state or country.
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