Indian police yesterday said they have busted an Internet scam in which about 650,000 people lost a combined 37 billion rupees (US$549 million) after sending money to a company that promised they would earn cash by clicking on Web links.
Police, who said the pyramid-style scheme was one of India’s biggest ever, said they had arrested three ringleaders on the outskirts of New Delhi and seized more than 5 billion rupees from bank accounts.
“They learned that if you give some money back to members, the investments would go up exponentially,” said Amit Pathak, head of a police cybercrime unit in Uttar Pradesh.
The men ran a series of Web sites that promised would-be subscribers a chance to earn 5 rupees each time they clicked or liked Web links sent to their mobile phones, police said.
The unsuspecting investors each paid thousands of rupees into the company’s bank accounts to join the scheme, but the Web links they received were fake.
The company running the alleged scam had operated for years, but earned almost all the money over a few months from August last year, after it began to distribute some of the proceeds, using the beneficiaries to draw in more investors.
When police raided the company’s head office in Noida they found 250 passports of employees and members who had been rewarded with a holiday to Australia. The scammers planned to film the holiday and then post it online to lure more subscribers.
The alleged mastermind spent some of the proceeds on houses, cars and celebrity parties.
Pathak said it would take time to trace most of the money and several bank employees were believed to be involved.
“It’s a very big task for us. We have brought in ... other government agencies to trace the money,” Pathak said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day