Meerut, Jan. 31 -- A major Goods and Services Tax (GST) fraud involving fake firms, bogus invoices and hawala transactions has been unearthed in Bareilly district, with the Crime Branch Special Investigation Team (SIT) arresting the alleged mastermind, Yogesh Sharma, from Ghaziabad on Thursday. It is alleged, through the racket the accused fraudulently availed nearly Rs.20 crore in Input Tax Credit (ITC) through forged invoices and e-way bills, police said on Friday. Acting under the directions of Bareilly senior superintendent of police (SSP) Anurag Arya, the Crime Branch tracked Sharma through detailed bank transaction scrutiny and cyber analysis. He was arrested from the gate of KDP Savana Apartments in Rajnagar Extension, Ghaziabad. Sharma, a resident of the Partapur area in Meerut, is alleged to have been running the organised economic crime for several years. During interrogation, police found that the gang showed large-scale movement of goods only on paper. In reality, trucks used in the transactions were running empty. To obtain GST registrations, the accused used rented shops as addresses and later changed locations to evade detection by the GST department. The proceeds of the fake transactions were allegedly routed through a hawala network to conceal the money trail. Investigations revealed that Yogesh Sharma, along with his associates Manish Agrawal, Gaurav Agrawal (both residents of Bareilly), Aparna Agrawal, and Aadi alias Yugansh Bisaria, floated a fake firm named Shri Shyam Traders in Bareilly. Through this single firm alone, the gang is accused of causing a revenue loss of around Rs.14 crore. In connection with the case, State Tax Officer Avinash Dixit had lodged an FIR at the Bithri Chainpur police station. Police also recovered a mobile phone from Sharma during his arrest. A large cache of digital evidence, including fake invoices, forged e-way bills and WhatsApp chats, was found on the device. The chats indicate that the syndicate had spread its network of bogus firms across multiple states. Given the volume of data, the police are now preparing to send the mobile phone for forensic examination. According to SIT's chief investigating officer inspector Sanjay Kumar Dheer, another key accused, Gaurav Agrawal, was arrested earlier on January 25 and has already been sent to jail. Following Sharma's arrest, police teams are now working to identify and nab other members of the network and hawala operators linked to the fraud. SSP said, "Based on the data recovered from the accused's mobile phone and hawala inputs, we are probing deep into this racket. Teams are conducting raids to arrest other accused and their facilitators. Our priority is to uproot such organised economic crimes from the roots."...