Guntur police bust betting racket, several students held

VIJAYAWADA: What started out as a small betting racket in Sattenaplli of Guntur district, turned out to be a country-wide network of cricket betting with an influence in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. This could be one of the biggest busts in cricket betting rackets in the country if Guntur police succeed in arresting all the bookies involved.

The betting racket first came to light with one of the punters lodging a complaint against once Pasupuleti Nagarjuna, who uses a website and whatsapp groups to conduct betting. Guntur police intensified the probe into the issue after they found out that a majority of the punters involved in betting are students studying professional courses.

The cops arrested 250 punters, most of who were students, along with Nagarjuna and three others from Bhopal. A deeper probe into the racket revealed that Nagarjuna is only one of the local bookies under Avadeesh Pratap Singh from Bhopal.

Guntur Rural SP, S V Rajasekhara Babu, constituted a special team to reach out to the kingpin of the network. The special team nabbed one Abir Chanda (33), a native of Kolkata. Chanda had supplied the software used by Avadeesh and other bookies based in Delhi and Mumbai.

After the arrest of Chanda, cops identified other bookies—Ayush, Kapil and Rinku from Delhi and Ram Wadhwa and Aman from Mumbai—who also run betting networks. Each bookie employs 10 to 20 master distributors under him. Each master distributor in turn employs 10 to 20 distributor level bookies. Distributor level bookies deal with the punters directly by creating whatsapp groups. Each distributor level bookie deals with 250 to 1,500 punters, said Rajasekhara Babu. Betting transactions can be traced from punters to distributor level bookies, to master distributors and finally, the owner of the network.

Guntur police also identified one Sayan Gosh (44) from Kolkata who developed the betting software. He has been arrested and produced in the local court.