Chargesheet filed against nine in over Rs 3-cr ‘digital arrest’ fraud with retd Col

The police have filed a chargesheet against nine persons for an alleged over Rs 3-crore “digital arrest” fraud with a retired Colonel living in Sector 2 here.

Advertisement

The chargesheet has been filed against Mahendra Kumawat, Mahak Yadav, Sachin Sharma, Rajat Sharma, Avtar Singh, Amritpal Singh, Sunil Kumar, Sandeep and Manish Kumar Baniwal.

The police had registered the case on a complaint of 82-year-old Colonel Dalip Singh Bajwa (retd), who had stated that on March 18, he had received a call from an international number and the caller introduced himself as an officer of the Enforcement Directorate. The caller claimed that the complainant had ‘sold’ his bank account to Naresh Goyal, the jailed owner of Jet Airways.

As the retired Colonel denied knowing Goyal, the caller claimed that he was in jail in a money laundering case and as many as 247 ATM cards were recovered from his house. One of the ATM cards bore his (Bajwa’s) name and Rs 20 lakhs had been deposited in the linked account.

The cybercriminals claimed that Goyal had told the police that Bajwa had ‘sold’ his bank account to him for Rs 5 lakhs and received Rs 20 lakhs for laundering Rs 2 crores. They claimed that the huge amount of money was laundered from the account and the Supreme Court had issued an arrest order against him. They threatened to arrest him and coerced him to transfer over Rs 3.41 crores to five accounts to save him from arrest.

The accused used various phone numbers to contact the Colonel and his wife and maintained constant pressure using fabricated legal threats. During a video call on March 27, the caller even showed a fake judge in a fake courtroom with phoney cops around him.

During an investigation into the complaint, the police arrested the accused belonging to Haryana and Rajasthan. According to the police, the accused opened bank accounts with a criminal conspiracy and sed them to receive money from the complainant.