Hyderabad: The Rachakonda police on Tuesday arrested five people for online and offline cricket betting under the Chaitanyapuri police station. At the time of the arrests, police officials seized Rs 14.92 lakh, one laptop and eight mobile phones; all worth about Rs 16,00,000 in total.
According to police, the accused are identified as 36-year-old Bairamal Sridhar a businessman and a resident of Kothapet, 26-year-old Sambram Ramanjaneyulu a driver and a resident of Uppal, 43-year-old Jajula Ramu gouda shop owner, 51-year-old Boinpally Chatrapathi a real estate businessman and a resident of Saroornagar, and 40-year-old Gouni Kalyan a real estate a businessman and a resident of Saroornagar.
Accused Bairamal Sridhar has a book stall at Koti and Sambram Ramanjaneyulu works at the shop of Bairamal. The other three accused are well acquainted with the Bairamal.
For the last couple of years, Bairamal has allegedly been running online cricket betting from his home by downloading certain online cricket apps like ‘Cricket line guru’ and ‘cricket exchange’, which are available on the Google Play Store to earn money easily.
The above mentioned mobile apps are meant for real-time cricket scores, in which they provide ball by ball fastest live cricket score updates of the live cricket matches. Apart from the live score updates, the name of the favourite team and prediction of the match-winning ratio and also displays in the app. Taking that as an advantage, Bairamal started online and offline cricket betting by his laptop associating his other four accused as punters, stated the police.
The accused conducted online betting for the last two ICC T-20 world cup matches. The conducted betting for the India Vs Pakistan match was held on October 24, and the Afghanistan Vs Scotland match was held on October 25. Likewise, they were preparing for betting for today’s match West Indies Vs South Africa and Pakistan Vs New Zealand, when the Rachakonda police along with the special operation team raided the residential Bairamal and caught all the accused red-handed.