AHMEDABAD: Devendrasinh Gohil felt a chill run down his spine as he answered a call from an unknown Mumbai number.

A woman's voice, broken by sobs, left him flustered.

She was pleading with him to stop his men from hounding her for the money she owed him.

She said she had borrowed a small amount from Gohil's loan app, CandyCash, but was unable to pay the exorbitant interest.

"The woman said she had no way out but to end her life if the harassment continued," said Gohil, who kept telling her that he did not own any mobile app but ran an NBFC firm in Rajkot, Dealing Beneficial Financial Services Pvt Ltd, which dealt in offline finance.

When Gohil checked Playstore, he found that the CandyCash mobile application was registered in his firm's name and carried the address and details of his four branch offices in Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Vadodara and Junagadh.

Gohil told TOI, "My NBFC firm is RBI approved and the app had claimed it in the info on the Playstore to appear credible."Within 24 hours, on June 2, Gohil approached the local police and then the cyber cell of Gujarat CID crime's cyber forensics department.

'Hacker used VPN to launch app from server in Bengaluru' Time was running out for all of us.

If anybody committed suicide because of the harassment, then I would not have been able to forgive myself for it," says Devendrasinh Gohil."We traced the mobile number and the gmail account used to launch the CandyCash app in Playstore and were shocked to find that they belonged to a 14-year-old schoolboy from Babra taluka in Amreli.

The boy had no clue about the goings-on.

Meanwhile, more victims began calling Gohil from Lucknow and Ahmedabad.

Four individuals even reached his branch office at the riverfront," said Manish Bhankharia, PI, cyber forensics and prevention, Gujarat CID (crime).

The CID team reverse-engineered the app and found that the hacker had used a VPN account and launched the app from a Bengaluru-based server."The CandyCash app directories had the same characteristics as other fake loan apps that were created in China," said Bhankharia.Over the past one year, the cyber forensics department has shut down 425 fake loan apps that were launched from servers in south-east Asian countries and then rented out to cybercriminals in India.There were over 1 lakh views for the CandyCash app on the Play Store alone.

"A number of gullible victims had downloaded it and taken microloans of Rs 3,000 and Rs 5,000.

They were being asked to pay 3.5 times the loaned amount by the scammers," said Bhankharia.