CP Forms SIT After Rs 116 Crore Cyber Fraud

Varanasi Police Commissioner Mohit Agrawal constituted a seven-member special investigation team on Thursday, 27 August 2026, to work the Rs 116 crore cyber-fraud file that already lists 143 victims. DCP Cyber Crime Neetu Kadyan is to lead the assignment. ACP Cyber Vinay Dwivedi is the SIT chief. The Commissionerate has also contacted Lucknow’s cyber headquarters.

Thursday’s order is the news. The four men already in jail were not arrested on Thursday. Chetganj police and the cyber cell picked them up on Sunday, 23 August. They are Nitin, also recorded as Nitish Pandey, of Rohtas origin and living in Karaundi under Chitaipur; Dushyant Singh of Kabir Nagar, Durgakund; Himanshu Jha of Chhittupur, Sigra; and Md Rehan of Shivala, Bhelupur.

The Commissioner has described the alleged method as fake firms, mule accounts, and a gaming-and-betting layer that police say has run since the lockdown. The Rs 116 crore figure and the 143-victim count sit on that same briefing. They measure the case the SIT is being asked to take over, not a fresh Thursday haul.

Two men remain wanted. Police have named Prateek Tiwari, alias Bunty, of Samneghat, and Romil Verma. Raids for them continue. Agrawal has said more Varanasi arrests are expected. He has also said gangster-act action is contemplated against those already jailed and those still wanted, and that proceeds-of-crime seizure will be pressed under the new law.

After the four went to jail, the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal recorded what the Commissionerate called a flood of complaints. About 150 portal complaints were cited in the same Thursday briefing. That is a second figure, not a second count of the 143 victims. The 143 are the victims already attached to the Rs 116 crore case. The about-150 are portal complaints that followed the Sunday arrests. The two numbers were given together. They were not added together.

States named with the victims include Uttar Pradesh, Bihar-Jharkhand, Mumbai, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Haryana and others. That spread is why Lucknow’s cyber headquarters has been brought in, and why the file has moved from a Chetganj-and-cyber-cell pickup to a seven-member SIT under a DCP lead.

The Commissioner’s public instruction is the golden-hour line. Do not share account numbers, PINs or OTPs. Call 1930. File on cybercrime.gov.in. The window he named is one to one-and-a-half hours after a fraud is noticed.

Kadyan as DCP Cyber Crime is the supervisory lead. Dwivedi as ACP Cyber is the SIT chief who will run the seven-member team. Chetganj and the cyber cell remain the units that produced Sunday’s four. Thursday’s work is constitution of the SIT, the Lucknow contact, and the Commissioner’s statement that more city arrests, gangster-act papers and proceeds-of-crime seizure are the next legal steps.

The wanted pair — Tiwari of Samneghat and Verma — are the open names. Until they are produced, the jail list stays at four: Pandey, Dushyant Singh, Himanshu Jha and Md Rehan, all of them Sunday arrests, all of them already inside.

NCRP traffic after a jail production is not the same thing as the victim list on the original file. Anyone reading 143 and about 150 as a single 293 is misreading the briefing. The 143 belong to the Rs 116 crore case. The about-150 belong to the portal surge that followed Sunday. Both figures are on the Thursday record. Neither replaces the other.

The Thursday SIT does not rewrite Sunday. It puts a seven-member team, a DCP lead and an ACP chief onto a Rs 116 crore file that already has 143 victims on it, about 150 later portal complaints beside it, and four accused already in jail.