Paytm representatives appear before Hyderabad police in online gaming racket case

Two representatives of Paytm were on Wednesday questioned in connection with payments routed through the digital gateway for an online gaming racket, busted here last week, police said.

"Yes two of them from Paytm appeared before the Hyderabad Police...we questioned them and asked for information pertaining to the online gaming case as bulk of the payment was through Paytm, a senior police official told PTI.

Four people, including a Chinese national, were arrested by Hyderabad Police in New Delhi last week for allegedly cheating two people here by organising the online gaming in violation of the ban on any kind of betting activity in Telangana.

Paytm representatives were questioned because the payment gateway had been used by the participants in the online game and information was needed on who sent the money and where it went, the official said.

"They gave some information and they are yet to furnish a lot of information...May be (in the) next few days we should be able to get it from them, the official added.

During the probe it came to light that the domain name servers of the gaming websites are based out of China while the data hosting services had been cloud-based in the US and operated from China.

Police had arrested Yah Hao, a Chinese national (Head of Operations for South East Asia of the company operating the gaming portal) and three of its Directors--Dheeraj Sarkar, Ankit Kapoor and Neeraj Tuli.

The amount frozen by investigators in bank accounts (at Gurugram) so far is nearly Rs 30 crore, police had said.

The total value of inward transactions in the two accounts traced so far was nearly Rs 1,100 crore, majority of the transactions took place this year, they had said.

According to police, the entire technical operation was run by the China-based directors and partners of these companies and the payments were being routed through India based payment service providers and gateways and in this case it was Paytm.