Chhattisgarh police have arrested three men hailing from Gujarat for their alleged involvement in a “hawala” money transfer racket and recovered ₹80 lakh cash from them in Raipur, officials said on Thursday.

The three were allegedly part of the racket which was engaged in transferring money collected through online betting and gaming applications, they said.

Efforts were on to trace a person belonging to Ahmedabad, who was running the illegal money racket from an office in Raipur, the police said.

Hawala denotes the illegal transfer of funds by skirting banking channels.

The Durg police on Wednesday arrested three persons, identified as Shakti Singh Jateja, 26, Jayendra Singh Jateja, 21, and Akash Kumar Dave, 31, all residents of Patan district in Gujarat, from an office in Shankar Nagar area of Raipur, Durg superintendent of police Jitendra Shukla said.

The action followed the arrest of an online betting and gaming app panel operator last week in the Bhilai area of Durg, he said.

On June 28, Vinay Kumar Yadav, a resident of Ruabandha (Bhilai), was apprehended from Supela area when he was allegedly engaged in betting through an online gaming app from his car, the official said.

Yadav told the police that he had transferred through hawala the money collected via betting to those who had provided him with a panel of the online betting app, he said.

The man also informed about the office in Raipur’s Shankar Nagar area where the hawala operations were being carried out, following which a Durg police team was constituted for further action, Shukla said.

After conducting a recce, the team raided the office in Raipur on Wednesday and rounded up the trio, he said.

During questioning, the accused told the police that they were engaged in transferring money collected from online betting through the same office which was being operated by a person, identified as Dinesh Bhai, from Ahmedabad, he said.

From the office, the police recovered ₹80 lakh in cash, two mobile phones, a note counting machine and eight bundles of currency notes in the denominations of ₹1, ₹2, ₹5, ₹10 and ₹20 used as code to illegally transfer money under a token system, he said.

“Efforts are on to trace Dinesh Bhai, who was operating the hawala racket office in Raipur from Ahmedabad and is absconding,” the official said.

Liquor ‘scam’

The ED on Thursday said it has arrested two liquor businessmen in connection with its money laundering probe into an alleged excise scam in Chhattisgarh that is estimated to have generated over ₹2,100 crore of slush funds.

Arvind Singh and Trilok Singh Dhillon were arrested on July 1 at the central jail in Raipur and later a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court sent them to ED custody till July 6, the federal probe agency said in a statement.