Loan app racket: Telangana cops pick one more Chinese from Thane

HYDERABAD: Telangana police on Wednesday arrested Chinese national He Jian and an Indian associate from Thane in the ongoing illegal instant loan app case that has links across the country.

Rachakonda police commissioner Mahesh Bhagawat said they came across the names of Jian, alias Mark (26), and his Indian associate Vivek Kumar, as key operators of the instant loan business after interrogating Liang TianTian, a Chinese woman, and two others picked up on December 25 from a Pune call centre.

The officials have so far arrested five Chinese nationals. Three of them, Yi Bai, Liang TianTian and Zhu Wei, alias Lambo, have been arrested in the past two months and booked in the instant loan app case. The fourth, Yah Hao, was arrested in August for running an online gambling racket in which a large number of Indians have lost crores of rupees. He is in jail

In the latest case, police landed in Thane after examining more than 100 laptops and documents seized in the Christmas day raid, and found Jian holed up there along with Vivek.

They were first produced in a local court and brought to Hyderabad on prison transit warrant.

Police froze Rs 30 crore parked in different bank accounts and said

Jian operated 24 mobile phone applications, which are into the disbursement of loans at high-interest rates.

“The apps through which loans have been disbursed had no valid licence from Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to run Non-Banking Finance Companies (NBFCs),” Bhagawat told a media conference.

Explaining their modus operandi, Bhagawat said that after one week of sanctioning the loan to a customer, Jian and his associates would harass people to return the money.

“The defaulters were harassed and defamed through calls and messages to all persons in his/her telephone call list,” said Bhagawat.

Investigations have so far revealed that Jian came to India in 2019 on a business visa.

“He came as a representative of Chinese nationals Xu Nan, Xu Xinchang and Zhao Qiao who are directors of Ajaya Solutions, which is into microfinance loan apps companies. They later appointed Ankur Singh as director of the company,” added Bhagawat.

After setting up the company for disbursement of loans, Jian and his China-based superiors had initially set up a call centre at Thane for recovery of loans. Later they outsourced the recovery aspect to the earlier arrested Tian Tian and her husband, Parshuram Lahu Takve, who operated a company called Jia Liang Infotech pvt ltd in Pune.