Bid to pass off fake gold as genuine; woman, son held in Panchkula

A woman and her son were arrested for attempting to dupe a jeweller by passing off a fake gold brick as genuine.

The accused were identified as Sunita and Neeraj Kumar, who hail from Mansa district of Punjab and currently living in Zirakpur.

The Sector 16 police post team apprehended the duo and recovered an 865-gm fake gold brick. Both were produced in a court, which remanded them to three-day police custody for detailed investigation.

According to the complainant, Munish Verma, a young man had visited his shop in Budhanpur on Monday, claiming to possess an ancestral gold brick from his grandfather’s time. Suspicious, the jeweller tested the brick and found it to be brass. As he confronted the youth, the latter’s mother arrived and repeated the claim that the item was family gold.

During interrogation following their arrest, they admitted to having previously purchased fake gold from Pathankot and selling it to a dhaba owner in Amritsar for Rs 2.5 lakh. The police are now investigating their past frauds and possible accomplices.