Three nabbed for conning elderly into selling their jewellery at inflated prices

Two women were arrested along with a 59-year-old auto-rickshaw driver for allegedly duping elderly women of their jewellery and other belongings after scaring them about recent crimes in the city or luring them by offering to buy their jewellery double or triple the actual prime, police said on Saturday.

Apart from a gold chain and pendant that the two sisters had stolen from an elderly woman in south Delhi last month, three mobile phones and an auto-rickshaw used in the crime were also recovered from them. A total of five such cases registered in Delhi have been solved with the arrest of the trio, said deputy commissioner of police (south) Atul Kumar Thakur.

Police identified the three as Aarti Rathore,30, her sister Kiran Rathore,25, and Madan (single name), the auto driver. Aarti sold used clothes while Kiran is a beautician by profession. They were last arrested in Uttarakhand’s Dehradun in a similar cheating case, the DCP said.

On December 25, DCP Thakur said, a 60-year-old woman filed a complaint and alleged that three women duped her of her jewellery and some money in a park in Lado Sarai near Mehrauli. The elderly woman alleged that she was going to get her spectacles repaired when a woman asked her the directions to reach Dhaula Kuan.

“The elderly woman was telling her the route when two more women arrived and lured her to sit in an auto by telling her that they would drop her to her destination. The women took her to a park in Lado Sarai and tricked her into removing her jewellery by telling her that it was not safe to be out wearing so much jewellery,” the DCP added.

The women gave her a handkerchief and asked her to keep the jewellery in it. As the elderly kept the jewellery, the women replaced the handkerchief with a similar one and kept it in her bag before they all left the park. The woman found the jewellery and cash missing when she returned home and opened the bag, said the police.

A case of cheating was registered and the police scanned the CCTV cameras of the routes that the woman and the suspects had taken. The police first identified the auto and nabbed its driver, Madan. His interrogation led to the arrest of the two sisters, the police said.