New Delhi: Delhi Police have arrested five men and claimed to have solved the fraud of search engine optimization which pushed several e-commerce websites fraud for people who were cheated, police said on Thursday.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to websites or web pages from search engines.
The defendant has been identified as Vijay Arora (37), a resident of Paschim Vihar; Manmeet Singh (29) and Avtar Singh (32), both the nilothhi extension occupants; Rajkumar (30), residents of Obwasan; and Pradeep Kumar (32), residents of Rani Bagh.
More than 10,000 people were cheated around Rs 25 Crore in the last three years, police said.
According to the police, they received several complaints where the victims accused that they had booked a tablet from www.bookmytab.com after payment in advance of Rs 3,699 or Rs 3.999, but the product was never delivered.
Police scan a website and know that it was used to deceive people on a very large scale and several complaints were also found online, said a senior police officer.
“During the investigation, the location of Zero defendant.
Raid was carried out at the location of the main defendant and incriminating materials and inferior quality products recovered from his office,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber) Anyesh Roy.
Then, the operating manager and campaign manager, who are involved in search engine optimization to encourage fraud websites, are also arrested, DCP said.
Arora started its own company as a courier aggregator for several online shopping companies from which he got the idea to make a fake shopping website.
In the past three years, he has created more than 60 fake shopping websites.
This website offers electronic goods or clothing items at affordable prices, police said.
However, after receiving payment, they do not send the product.
If a victim asks for a refund, they are used to send inferior quality products, they say.
Pradeep Kumar is a graduate of BTECH from Karnataka and is experienced with the latest technology.
He is the main online campaign manager of all operations that use search engine optimization techniques to advertise and encourage online fraud websites.
He has, so far, creates more than 30 websites for Arora, police said.