Nagpur Cyber Police have dismantled an organised syndicate that used the trusted image of delivery personnel to harvest residents’ personal and banking details before feeding them into a sprawling mule bank account network. A 32-year-old woman, Ujjwala Tarachand Rajgire, has been arrested, while three named accomplices, Salim Jakir Shaikh, Bharat Israni and Amit Ramteke, remain at large. The scale of what investigators recovered from a rented house in Nagpur’s Hudkeshwar area, 209 SIM cards, 40 ATM cards, 45 bank passbooks and a small arsenal of forged documents and official-looking seals, points to an operation built specifically to manufacture fraudulent financial infrastructure at volume.
A Trusted Uniform Used to Harvest Personal Data
What sets this case apart from a typical mule account bust is the method of recruitment investigators say the syndicate relied on. Rather than approaching victims directly with suspicious offers, the accused allegedly posed as delivery agents, visiting different localities to collect mobile numbers and personal details from residents under the cover of a role most people instinctively trust and rarely question.
That access was reportedly then exploited to extract OTPs, banking credentials and other confidential information through various pretexts, feeding directly into the group’s ability to open fraudulent accounts and conduct unauthorised financial transactions. It is a pattern that mirrors a wider trend cybercrime investigators across India have flagged in recent months, where delivery personnel, whether genuinely employed or merely posing as such, have repeatedly turned up as facilitators in mule account networks, drawn in or set up specifically because their role grants unusual, largely unquestioned access to people’s homes and personal information.
A Warehouse of Fraud-Ready Documents
The scale of the seizure recovered during the raid illustrates just how industrialised this operation had become. Alongside the SIM cards and ATM cards, police found 45 Aadhaar cards, 12 PAN cards, 180 cheque books, ten rubber stamps, five official seals and three cash-counting machines, equipment far in excess of what any individual account holder would plausibly need, and consistent instead with a dedicated production line for fraudulent banking identities.
During questioning, the arrested woman allegedly admitted to her role in the network, telling investigators the accused opened mule accounts in the names of various individuals specifically to receive and move money obtained through cyber fraud, a layering technique designed to frustrate exactly the kind of tracing effort police are now undertaking. Nearly 200 bank accounts linked to the network have already been identified, with the process of freezing them underway even as forensic examination of seized digital devices continues.
A Trail Investigators Believe Extends Well Beyond Nagpur
Police suspect the operation’s reach was not confined to Nagpur alone, and are now analysing digital trails, banking records and communication data to identify associates potentially operating in other states. This suspicion fits a broader national pattern that has become increasingly visible over the past year, with mule account networks uncovered in Gujarat, Hyderabad and elsewhere repeatedly showing signs of coordination across state lines, often supplying rented or fraudulently opened accounts to cybercriminal syndicates carrying out large-scale fraud with no direct connection to wherever the accounts themselves were physically opened.
The scale of India’s underlying mule account problem gives this local bust its national context. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre had already flagged more than 2.47 million Layer-1 mule accounts nationwide as of early 2026, with a separate fraud intelligence report identifying over 524,000 suspected mule accounts and digital identities in March 2026 alone. Investigators believe the Nagpur network may similarly have been supplying ready-made banking infrastructure to organised syndicates carrying out fraud worth crores of rupees, rather than operating as an isolated local racket.
Cybercrime expert and former IPS officer Prof. Triveni Singh said mule bank accounts have become one of the most critical components of organised cybercrime precisely because fraudsters rarely allow stolen money to sit in a single account, moving it rapidly through multiple fake accounts specifically to complicate investigation and delay recovery. He urged citizens never to share their bank accounts, ATM cards, SIM cards, OTPs or KYC documents with unknown individuals, however legitimate the request may appear, and to report any suspicious activity immediately through the National Cyber Crime Helpline at 1930 or the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal so that timely action can be taken before funds move beyond recovery.
