The Bharuch Local Crime Branch (LCB) said a total of five people have been accused in the case. Hemant Patel, a resident of Apna Nagar in Bharuch was arrested and sent on a five day judicial remand. Two more, Mehul Patel of Rachna Nagar and Ravi Prakash were arrested on Saturday evening. Two others, Harshad Rana of Rajnigandha society and Maheshwari Aggarwal, are still at large.

“This is only the beginning. Hundreds of people have been conned by these people, who took advantage of the economic crisis and promised them that the money they would put in the account would increase twice a month,” said LCB Inspector Dilip Aggarwal.

He added that the five accused told their customers that they were representatives of a Switzerland-based bank and even furnished details of a website as proof. Aggarwal said the incident came to light after one Kirtan Akruwala, a resident of Rachna Society, complained to Bharuch Superintendent of Police Subhash Trivedi who in turn handed over the case to the LCB after investigating the complaint.

The LCB found that the accused used Internet-based account transfers to open the accounts. “We are yet to prepare an estimate of the total amount, as more and more people are turning up saying that they have been conned by the accused,” said a police officer.

The police are yet to disclose further details of the accused, but sources said all of them are expert web developers.

Unsafe Atom: How the five duped people?
Local Crime Branch Inspector Dilip Aggarwal, who cracked the modus operandi of the accused in the ‘Swiss Bank scam’ case, said the five divided themselves into a team and convinced the people in their respective neighbourhood to put in the money.

“With their laptops, the accused would roam around in their neighbourhood from door to door. Once given a chance, they would show the website on the computers and ask them to log on to their site [www.safeatom.com],” said Inspector Aggarwal, adding that the site is actually a replica of the original safeatom site.

“After the site stopped working, one of the complainants became suspicious,” he said.