Abdus Salam Polash, owner of Rex IT Institute, was arrested from Bashundhara residential area on Friday, May 10, 2019
Dhaka Tribune
The accused fraud, Abdus Salam Polash, is the owner of Rex IT Institute which provides IT based training
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of police has arrested a man on charges of misappropriating a huge amount of money by digital fraud, that includes digital marketing and transactions.
The accused fraud, Abdus Salam Polash, owner of Rex IT Institute, was arrested from Bashundhara residential area at 10 pm on Friday.
Mollah Nazrul Islam, special superintendent of police (SSP) of CID, gave the news at a press conference on Sunday.
He said: “It seems Salam has misappropriated Tk200 crore from investors and clients under pretense of outsourcing, graphics design, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website design, digital marketing, and online transactions.”
“A car, around Tk7 lakh and some foreign currency, a number of laptops, and banking documents have been seized from his apartment and office in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi area.”
After numerous complaints from multiple victims, the CID launched an undercover investigation into Salam’s businesses and found the allegations to be true. A case was filed against Polash with Dhanmondi police station for money laundering and forgery under the Special Powers Act (SPA), he said.
CID official Molla said, Rex IT Institute supposedly provides training to people on outsourcing, graphic design, SEO, web design, and digital marketing.
“The company first lures investors into the digital world using free marketing techniques. Then they provide lucrative offers paid marketing through social media platforms. They would offer 50% to 100% return on investment to investors in the company. Over five thousand trainees at the company were convinced to invest in this manner.”
“Apart from trainees, many business persons also invested in the company with the promise of more profits,” said Molla.
“Sensing CID was on to him, Salam went into hiding. Even though he was hiding, he continued his campaign on social media platforms and got more people to invest in his new projects with special offers. He also opened a fake website named advertgold.com which sounds close and similar to adverten.com, which is a full-service advertising and marketing agency.”
In primary interrogation, Abdus Salam confessed to how he ran the business. He said investors needed a PayPal account for global online transactions. As PayPal has no operations in Bangladesh, investors use his (Abdus Salam’s) American PayPal account which gives him the opportunity to embezzle the money,” the CID official added.
Abdus Salam from Chandraganj of Lakshmipur district, started Rex IT Institute with a few partners in 2017. Though initially the company provided genuine IT training, it became a crooked company defrauding hundreds of investors and clients.