Sarnath Police Book Two Over Alleged Sale of Mule Bank Accounts

Sarnath police have registered a cyber-related case and booked two people on allegations that mule bank accounts were sold on commission for use in cyber fraud, according to a Saturday 22 August 2026 police-attributed brief published about 02:15 IST.

Police material summarised in the listing centres on Pradeep Bhardwaj allegedly selling mule accounts on commission. The investigation, as printed, found that an account was sold via Firoz Ali to cyber-fraud operators. Four accounts were used to withdraw money and to shop, two persons have been booked, and related cases have been cited in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, the brief said.

All of that sits at FIR stage. These are police-attributed claims, not court findings. This report uses alleged, police say and booked language throughout and does not treat guilt as proved. Names appear because they are in the published listing — Pradeep Bhardwaj and Firoz Ali among them — and not because a court has ruled on their role.

How mule accounts work, in the pattern police describe in such cases, is straightforward enough: an account opened in one name is later used by someone else to move stolen or cheated money. Withdrawals at cash points and shopping trails then pull the money out of the banking system in smaller pieces. Saturday’s Sarnath file, as summarised overnight, fits that outline — commission sale, an intermediary named in the probe summary, four accounts in use, and related-case citations stretched across four states. The extract used for this desk package does not publish a single victim loss figure, a bank list, or recovered-cash numbers.

The case is kept separate from already-live matrimonial-scam coverage out of the city and from older citywide mule-network stories that ran on other dates. Saturday’s peg is a new Sarnath registration and a booking count tied to the alleged commission sale of mule accounts. Mixing those earlier files into this one would blur the FIR that the overnight brief actually summarised.

Still missing from the Saturday brief, and therefore not filled in here: charge-sheet timelines, the exact IPC or Information Technology Act sections formally applied on the Sarnath registration, and any public map that links the four accounts to named banks or branches. Account numbers, victim names, mobile numbers and recovered sums are not invented for length.

As of Saturday’s police-attributed brief, the Sarnath case remains at FIR stage with two persons booked over the alleged commission sale of mule accounts.