SCAMSTERS INC.

A fresh miscellaneous petition was filed in the High Court against the Bengaluru International Airport Limited (BIAL) seeking direction to register a criminal case against it for the alleged fraud in implementing the project. The Airport Authority Employees Union stated in its petition that BIAL had to be prosecuted for committing fraud by filing a false counter in the court.

In the counter filed in April, 2008, BIAL stated that it had invested Rs.2470 crore on the project and its concessionaires like hoteliers had invested about Rs.2000 crore. By accepting the counter filed by BIAL, the court had refused to stay the closure of HAL airport.

Interestingly, the annual returns of the BIAL, details of which were gathered by the petitioner, show that the total investment for the airport project was Rs.1700 crore.

The petitioner further submitted that the claim of other concessionaires like hoteliers having invested about Rs.2,800 crore within the airport hub had not been substantiated in the annual returns filed by BIAL. “BIAL is not only misleading the court but also misleading the public at large by taking into possession a vast land in Devanahalli,” the petitioner argued.

Source: Expres Buzz

After being on the run for months together, the head of National Institute of Management (NIM), Ashraf Khan, surrendered before the
city police on Wednesday. Khan had disappeared from the city after cops raided NIM premises in Alkapuri and Karelibaug and busted a bogus certificate scam in December last year.

Ashraf had earlier applied for bail in Gujarat High Court but it was rejected following which he surrendered before the police. "We have arrested him. Khanhas been remanded to police custody for seven days. His arrest will help us in investigating the case thoroughly and catch hold of more scamsters," said DL Jhala, Sayajigunj police inspector.

The cops had already arrested former ABVP leader Kaushal Dave who working as assistant manager at NIM after the scam came to light last year. The management of Lokseva Foundation Trust-run NIM was found selling fake degree certificates and marksheets. The cops had seized 356 fake degree certificates and 637 marksheets from the institute's Alkapuri branch and around 100 fake documents were recovered from Karelibaug branch of the institute.

Officials say the institute could have issued over 2,000 fake certificates till date. The seized degrees include those for MBA, hotel management and engineering courses. The cops had unearthed the scam through a decoy, who posed as Bipinchandra Patel, a class VII pass out wireman and approached NIM officials. Patel managed to get a master's degree in mechanical engineering without appearing in any exam but paying Rs 30,000 fees.

Source: TOI

Mehul Patel, prime accused in an online fraud, whereby scamsters duped thousands of locals by promising them returns on their

investment, was remanded to four days of police custody by a local court on Tuesday.

Local crime branch police officials also raided Patel's house in Bharuch and impounded three luxury cars worth Rs 15 lakh, four laptops and pen drives from there.

Apart from Patel, five accused are already in police custody, while police have started their hunt for Urvish Patel of Vadodara, who is suspected to be the mastermind of the scam by creating www.safeatom.com website.

An official of Bharuch DCB said, "We expect to unearth more scams, wherein locals were duped of crores, during Mehul's interrogation."

Source: TOI

The principal sessions judge for CBI cases on Monday sentenced eight persons, six of them employees of Food Corporation of India and
their relatives, for three years rigorous imprisonment after they were convicted in a medical reimbursement scam. The accused, Sukumaran Nair, M Shankaran, P T Easwaran, M Anbalagan, X Arokianathan, B Gunasekaran, all working in clerical positions in FCI and their relatives S Gnanamoorthy and S Rajaram were directed to also pay fines between Rs 35,000 to Rs 55,000.

According to the prosecution, the accused forged rubber stamps of several government hospitals, prescription pads of doctors and cash bills of pharmacies to submit 187 fraudulent medical reimbursement bills in their names and those of other employees. The prosecution argued that the accused thus cheated FCI, causing wrongful loss to the organisation.

The fraud was exposed in 1988 after the company management lodged a complaint with the anti-corruption wing of CBI in Chennai. CBI found that the employees created bills for non-existent drugs for unknown diseases and forged prescriptions of non-existent doctors. "All the accused were equally involved in the case. They planned things meticulously and had a huge collection of fake rubber stamps of various hospitals," a CBI official said. They even submitted medical reimbursement bills in the names of non-existent employees using these bogus bills.

"They entered fancy amounts in bogus bills in the name of several medical shops. It was their greed that exposed them. Otherwise the fraud would have continued unnoticed," the official added.

Though the CBI filed the chargesheet in this case in 1988 itself, the trial of the case was delayed. "There were eight accused in the case and all had to appear before the court together during trial. However, they never appeared together, causing the delay. Some of them also approached courts and got stay orders, which we had to counter and get vacated," the official added.

After the trial, principal sessions judge K Naganathan held the accused responsible for the fraud. He then sentenced them to three years rigorous imprisonment. He also imposed a fine of Rs 50,000 on prime accused Sukumaran Nair, Rs 55,000 each on accused number two to six and Rs 35,000 on accused number seven and eight.

Source: TOI

Several residents of Pallikaranai, most of them women, filed a complaint with the suburban police on Sunday saying they were cheated by
a medical store owner of the area who ran a chit fund scheme. Rajeshwaran and his family, the complant said, had cheated 500 people of Rs 1.5 crore.

The victims, including some from Velachery stated that every month they deposited amounts ranging from Rs 2,000 to Rs 10,000 with Rajeshwaran. In the chit-fund system, subscribers are promised high returns at the end of a certain period of time. The only guarantee of high returns given by the fund collector is oral.

Rajeshwaran, for a while, scrupulously paid the returns every few months and managed to increase his customer base. On January 22, some depositors went to collect their returns and were asked to come back on January 28 as Rajeshwaran had to go to Nagercoil. They returned on January 28 and found his shop and house locked. Rajeshwaran, his wife Lakshmi and daughter Kalaiarasi were missing. They couldn't be reached over the phone either.

The depositors then approached the suburban police.

Source:TOI

The CBI has registered a case against a former Union Bank of India official in Bangalore and two others for allegedly committing fraud to the tune of Rs 11 crores.
The trio, including a former branch manager of Union Bank of India, Avenue road branch in Bangalore along with chairman and director of a private company, were alleged to have fraudulently availed credit facilities and presented fake supplier bills.

" They committed breach of trust, cheating, forgery, criminal misconduct and used the forged documents as genuine to cause wrongful gain for themselves and wrongful loss to the bank to the tune of Rs 11 crores,"the CBI spokesperson said here in a release today.

The agency after taking the opinion by the Advisory Board for Banking, Commercial and Financial Frauds, took up the case under relevant sections of IPC against the trio and few others.

CBI officials conducted searches on the official and residential premises of the accused at Bangalore, Jabalpur, Kolkata and Doddaballapur (Karnatka) and recovered incriminating documents.

Source: PTI

At least 105 people, including some students, were arrested from Jaipur and Bhopal allegedly for leaking question papers of a Railway Recruitment Board examination scheduled for Sunday.

The Railway Recruitment Board Ajmer has postponed its scheduled examination for Assistant Station Master (ASM) and about 105 persons including aspiring candidates have been detained from Jaipur, Rajasthan ATS chief Kapil Garg said in Jaipur.

"In a joint operation with Rajasthan Special Operations Group and Bhopal Police, 112 people have been arrested in connection with paper leak of the RRB examination. While 14 gang members and 93 aspirants were arrested from Jaipur, rest were arrested from Bhopal," Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) STF of UP Amitabh Yash told reporters in Lucknow.

Yash said that information was being received that a well connected gang was active across the country in leaking question papers of examinations conducted by the RRB.

The SSP said that acting on the information, raids were carried out by the STF in Jaipur and Bhopal with the help of the local police.

"During a raid at a motel in Jaipur 14 members of a gang involved in the racket and 93 aspirants were arrested and question papers were recovered. Similarly in Bhopal four gang members, besides, aspirants were arrested," he said.

"The gang adopted a unique modus operandi. Instead of providing question papers to the aspirants, they used to ask the aspirants to gather at one place on the eve of examination. There the aspirants were asked to learn the question paper. On the examination day, the aspirants were dropped at the centre," Yash added.

He said that the gang members included some former and current railway employees.

"While the gang has its base in Bihar, majority of the aspirants arrested during the two operations also hail from the same state," he said.

"We are still interrogating the people involved as the gang is big in size with its area of operation extending across the country," he added.

He said that three months back a similar racket was busted in Allahabad in which 175 people were arrested.

As many as 75,000 candidates were scheduled to appear in the test to be held today at five districts in Rajasthan including Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, Ajmer and Bikaner.

The examination had to postpone due to some unavoidable circumstances and a notice to this effect has been pasted at all the examination centres, L R Meena, Senior Divisional Personnel Officer, Jaipur division-NW Railway told reporters.

Source: Zee News