Trio held for duping people on pretext of selling mortgaged properties

The police arrested three people over the last week for allegedly duping several people of crores of rupees on the pretext of selling mortgaged properties, over the last few months. The suspects had created a fake domain name (website) and an email ID closely resembling that of a public sector bank, and presented themselves as bank employees to fool their targets, the police said on Tuesday.

According to the police, around 20 people have been duped so far and they are estimated to have struck deals for around ₹100 crore.

According to the police, one of the suspects, a former employee of the bank, managed to get details of mortgaged properties as he was aware of the auction processes of the bank. The suspects allegedly approached prospective buyers as representatives of the bank and after finalising the deal, shared the sale proposal from the fake email ID and got them to deposit the property cost in their bank account. The suspects were allegedly planning to move to Dubai after collecting ₹40 crore over the next week.

On February 15, Gaurav Sahni of Gurugram had filed a complaint with the cyber police station alleging that he was duped of ₹2.38 crore by people claiming to be bank employees, who had offered to sell him a mortgaged property with the bank.

Based on his complaint, a case was registered under sections 419 (impersonation), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using forged document as genuine) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 66D of IT Act at the Cyber police station

KK Rao, the commissioner of police, said that based on the bank account in which money was transferred, and tracking the fake email ID and domain used by the suspects, the police tracked the accused and arrested three of them from different locations.

The suspects were identified as Kishan Kumar of Delhi, Rakesh Vashiye alias Rakesh Gupta of Uttar Pradesh and Saurabh Palanwal, alias Sumit Sharma, alias Pashu, of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh.

Rao said they had arrested Kishan on February 17 and took him on two-day police remand. “During interrogation, he revealed the names of his two associates and the police arrested two other accused on February 19,” he said.

Kishan had earlier worked with the bank and was familiar with the process of auctioning mortgage property.

“Kishan hatched the plan to dupe people on the pretext of selling mortgaged property of banks and engaged his two friends Rakesh and Saurabh. They purchased a domain name similar to the bank name and created a fake email ID. They created a company — Aatma Ram Mahajan Building — and purchased a domain name ARMB. They presented ARMB as an asset recovery management branch of the bank,” said Rao.

The police said that the suspects approached prospective buyers as bank representatives and sent them proposals from the fake ID, which they claimed was of the asset recovery management branch of the bank. After finalising the deal, they asked their victims to transfer the money to their accounts, from which they re-transferred money to a different account and withdrew cash. They purchased three gold bricks for ₹1.50 crore from a jeweller in New Delhi.

“They were planning to collect ₹40 crore through this cheating and move to Dubai with the money. They had taken visas and were ready to close two more deals for ₹17 crore,” said Rao.