SCAMSTERS INC.

Its been a roller coaster ride for scamsters all through 2009. Requests pouring in to publish and expose scams throughout India was alarming. Honestly, I wanted to stop publishing them, but 'old habits die hard'.... I just couldn't stop telling the world that our corrupt political netas and other swindlers are growing richer by the day. This gave me a ray of hope, a hope that there are many Satyam's Ramalinga Raju and our OUTSOURCED Nigerean 419 scams which are brewing up rapidly.

Tourism minister G Janardhana Reddy claimed that Gowda family members would be behind the bars as the Supreme Court verdict in the mining bribery case is likely to be delivered soon. People have rejected leaders like Chandrababu Naidu and H D Deve Gowda and the two have become politically bankrupt, Reddy, who owns Obulapuram Mining Company, which is in the eye of a storm, told media persons in Tumkur.

Joining issue with Reddy, JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy predicted that Reddy brothers would go to jail for their illegal mining activities and looting the country's wealth.

“When I was the Chief Minister they had dragged my name in the mining scam. Now, their involvement in illegal mining has come in the open,” he told newsmen in Hassan.

Kumaraswamy claimed that the poll tie-up in the Council elections between the JD(S) and the Congress would change the political scenario in the State. Their main aim was to destabilise the communal forces in the State.

He alleged that the government had cheated farmers by giving excess land to NICE.

Source: Daiji World

The police, on Thursday, arrested five persons - including a bank employee and a taxi driver with 16 bank accounts to his name - in a multi-crore scam. The arrested have been identified as Ramesh Rathod, Vinod Tiwari, Shishir Dev Mishra, Manoj Shinde and Anam Siddique. Police have also detained Amrit Mule - an employee of a reputed bank - in the case.

While Rathod is employed with a reputed bank, Tiwari is the taxi driver, who played the vital role of encashing forged cheques from across the city after depositing them into his various bank accounts.

Like Tiwari, Mishra - a carpenter by profession - also encashed cheques for the gang. Shinde and Siddique are middlemen who obtained blank cheques of wealthy businessmen and companies and handed them over to the group. The six were arrested after they tried encashing a stolen cheque at an Axis Bank branch in Koparkhairane.

The blank cheque had been reported stolen by the owners of Saree Enterprises in Powai. The scamsters - according to police - sought information from bank employee Mule about the balance in company’s account, and then filled in an amount of Rs 2.5 lakh and forged the requisite signatures on the cheque.

The cheque was deposited in Tiwari’s account, but the police swooped in on the group before it could be encashed. Police sources disclosed that the six men are part of a much larger network that has embezzled more than Rs 300 crore.

Investigating officers also believe that there are multiple modules involved in the scam; each having a different modus operandi. In October, the police had arrested six men in connection with the case, thus taking the total tally of those arrested to 12 with Thursday’s arrests.

“We suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg and several more bank employees and scamsters are involved,” said API S N Bhandge, who is investigating the case. The earlier module busted by the Powai police involved an interrelated gang that deposited stolen cheques in bank accounts opened in fake names.

The gang first prepared fake identity cards like PAN card, voters ID, rations cards, etc, which were used to open bank accounts. The fake documents were also used to procure credit cards, whose bills were never paid.

“While the modus operandi is different, they are all connected,” Bhandge said. He elaborated that apart from using their bank accounts to deposit stolen cheques, the scamsters also lent the same accounts to others operating online UK lottery frauds and Nigerian SMS scams, for a small commission.

“The unsuspecting victims of lotteries and SMSes were given the same account numbers to deposit the money. Once the victim deposited the money, it was removed within seconds,” Bhandge said.

We suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg and several more bank employees and scamsters are involved - S N Bhandge, Asst Police Inspector

Source: Mumbai Mirror

With four generals and several other officers in the dock for the alleged Sukna land scam, the government has asked the Army to swiftly take the case to its logical conclusion.

"Whenever there is irregularity in any procedure or any functioning, the Service concerned looks into the matter and takes appropriate steps. The defence ministry had directed the Army to look into this matter and take appropriate decisions,'' said minister of state for defence M M Pallam Raju on Tuesday.

Defence minister A K Antony, on his part, has already warned the Army that such cases "not only damage its image'' but also "adversely affect the ability of senior officers to measure up to the expectations of the men they lead''.

MoD and Army HQ will take the final call whether the officers indicted by the court of inquiry (CoI) should face a court martial after summary of evidence (equivalent to framing of charges in a civil court) is recorded against them.

The case revolves around the Army's grant of a no-objection certificate (NoC) in February-March to business groups and a private education trust, which posed as an affiliate of the Ajmer-based Mayo College, to acquire a 71-acre tea estate adjacent to the Sukna military station. The area falls under the jurisdiction of the 33 Corps based in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal.

After the NoC was granted on February 6, an MoU was subsequently signed on March 20 between the Sukna station commander and four private entities -- J F Low & Co Ltd, Sheetala Vyapar Pvt Ltd, Mata Vaishnonodevi Mercantile Pvt Ltd and Akshara Vanijyar Pvt Ltd.

Incidentally, Army authorities had earlier refused the NoC and instead wanted the 71-acre land to be acquired from the West Bengal government, which had leased it to the four entities in 2006, for the force itself.

The officers questioned by the CoI include military secretary Lt-Gen Avadhesh Prakash, one of the eight principal staff officers to General Deepak Kapoor at the Army HQ here, the then 33 Corps chief Lt-Gen P K Rath and his deputy Lt-Gen Ramesh Halgali, as reported earlier.

Sources close to these officers, however, claim they are being needlessly victimised. "There is a scam behind the so-called scam. Not a single inch of land has changed hands. Moreover, the MoU, undertaken to allow the construction of a residential school, was cancelled in April itself after the Eastern Army Command (EAC) objected,'' said one.

Added another, "It's actually the result of a messy turf war raging between Gen Kapoor and his successor, EAC chief Lt-Gen V K Singh (who is slated to become Army chief on March 31, 2010).''

Source: TOI

When Sri Lankan national Umesh, alias Jatti, conned several people in Canada into parting with their credit card details and swindled several lakhs, he exposed the vulnerability of internet users to phishing scams and fake sites. Umesh, who was arrested two months back, had been running a fake credit card manufacturing unit in Valasaravakkam and had bought credit card and bank information from the international internet black market, which sells such data for as little as Rs 20 for a card. He’s just one of the few scamsters who fell into the police net though.

The cyber crime wing of the city police has been seeing a steady increase over the years in the number of such complaints. Till November 2009, the cyber crime wing received 920 complaints compared to a mere 35 in 2003.

In 2005, the cyber crime wing had got 173 complaints, of which they registered 28 cases. Subsequently, this number doubled to 350 in 2006, of which 17 cases were booked. In 2007, the number of complaints further doubled to 702 and the cyber crime branch booked 22 cases. In 2008, the crime branch got 852 complaints and registered 31 cases.

This year, while the complaints have shot up to 920 so far, 42 cases have been registered so far. It’s the highest since the wing was formed. “We are dealing with hacking of e-mail ids, online cheating, software theft, and posting of obscene pictures, apart from other computer and mobile phone related crimes.

Recently, many Nigerians were arrested for an online lottery scam,” a cyber official said. With white collar crimes on the rise, the cyber crime wing clearly finds itself snowed under a pile of investigations.

Source: TOI

The report of the M.S. Liberhan Commission, which probed the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya, has not left anybody wiser. In fact, there is more information available from other sources. The report appears to be incomprehensive despite the long time it took for Liberhan to submit his findings after so much money was spent and numerous extensions given.

What has surprised many is that Liberhan made no attempt to examine so many people who were in the know of things. Instead, he reached his conclusions that are not only inconsistent but are written in different styles of language across sections. Liberhan must have certainly silenced his critics in the bar who always questioned his ability to write judgements and reports.

The report actually made its way into the public domain through a selective leak to The Indian Express during Parliament session. Understandably, the leakage led to a hue and cry and both the Congress and the BJP accused each other of sharing the report with the newspaper. As according to the home minister’s statement, there were just two copies of the report and he assured members that he had not leaked it. The obvious implication of this was that the leakage occurred from Liberhan’s side.

Though the learned judge denied vehemently any such doing on his part, several BJP and Janata Dal (United) members admitted in private to the possibility of the hand of a Haryana politician in the affair. Many also saw this as a ploy to unite the divided BJP and also to enable L.K. Advani, under fire from the RSS, to extend his tenure as leader of the Opposition. The other explanation was that the report could have been leaked by the Congress to divide a united opposition wanting to discuss price rise, the Koda episode and a host of other issues.

But coming back to the report, a lot was made out of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s name appearing among those responsible for the conspiracy to knock down the Babri Masjid. VHP leader Ashok Singhal on Friday did confirm that Vajpayee was associated with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement even if there was nothing to suggest his direct involvement. In any case, he was the biggest beneficiary of the movement since he went on to become the Prime Minister for six-and-a-half years over two terms.

Singhal, incidentally, has advised Advani to refrain from saying things like “It was the saddest day of his life.”

The report goes on to absolve P.V. Narasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister. This has been done without caring to examine leaders like Makhan Lal Fotedar who was the only member of Rao’s Cabinet to resign on this issue and who had warned him time and again that the kar sevaks would demolish the disputed structure.

Fotedar, a former political adviser to both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, later told Rao at a Cabinet meeting on the day of the incident that he was to be blamed for the destruction of the structure. Earlier, the then President Shankar Dayal Sharma had told Fotedar that he got the impression that Rao had prevented Governor B. Satya Narayan Reddy from imposing President’s rule at that time as a pre-emptive step. Liberhan never examined Reddy.

Sources in the bureaucracy also confirmed that even the Cabinet Secretary S. Rajgopal had an inkling of what was going to happen on that day. But the PM overruled him. Singhal has alleged that Rao was sympathetic to their cause. The rest, as they say, is history.

What has surprised many is that the government’s comments on the report are extremely bureaucratic. It is true that with a report like this, there is nothing much any government can do in its Action Taken Report (ATR).

But the anthology of different styles in the Liberhan report is, in fact, a joke on the people of India. Who will ever believe any commission of inquiry after such a shoddy job? In the end, Justice Liberhan has no reason to be proud of himself. Between us.

Source: Hindustan Times