The Enforcement Directorate on Thursday (17 November) said that it on conducted raids on the offices of the payment gateways and few banks, and frozen balances worth Rs 1 crore belonging to accused persons in an online job scam having Chinese links.

The agency said that 16 locations of the payments gateways including Phonepe, Paytm, Google pay and Amazon pay and few banks like HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Dhanalakshmi Bank were searched on 14 and 15 November in the alleged money laundering case related to “Super Like Online Earning Application (Part time job scam)”.

"During the said search proceedings, around 80 bank accounts having balance to the tune of Rs 1 Crore, belonging to the accused persons have been freezed by ED," the agency said.

The ED initiated money laundering investigation in the case on the basis of FIR registered in March last year by Bengaluru police against Super Like Online Earning Application and other accused persons. 

"One app called “Super Like,” in which if the customers share photos and videos of celebrities by investing some money, they would get money as profit. By getting attracted towards this lucrative scheme, the common public invested funds in the said app and after sharing videos of celebrities they got some money as profit for some time," the ED said in a statement.

"However, after some time, even after sharing videos, photos, the customers did not get any return on the money and when they tried to take back their invested money, the amount was got blocked by the said application. Thus, by cheating the common public the accused persons collected huge amount of funds from the common public," it added.

The Bengaluru police had also filed a chargesheet in the said matter against a total 50 accused persons which also included two Chinese nationals Shen Long and Himani.