After the wide success of Sony Liv webseries Scam 1992, another web series called Scam 2003 was released, talking about the details of the whopping Rs 30,000 crore stamp paper scam carried out by a man named Abdul Karim Telgi.
Abdul Karim Telgi belonged to a lower middle class family and used to earn his living by selling fruits and vegetables on the train. After his father’s death, Telgi became the family patriarch, and the menial living he made by selling fruits started to stifle him.
After an encounter with a passenger, Abdul Karim Telgi started his journey towards minor counterfeit cases. He started his journey towards forgery and counterfeit documents by developing fake passports and other ID for labourers who wished to go to Saudi Arabia.
Soon, the cops put him behind bars in 1991 for his counterfeit acts, inspiring Telgi to think bigger. After jail, he started his counterfeit passport business but decided to go for something bigger – running a massive stamp paper scam.
Telgi started printing fake stamp papers, which are only bought by registered government vendors. These stamp papers were high in demand and low in supply, which paved the way for Telgi’s scam and made him a bigger kingpin than Scam 1992’s Harshad Mehta.
Over the course of 7 years, Telgi’s operation turned massive and he continued to buy machines to print fake stamp papers, which were mainly bought by commoners, banks, and insurance companies, leading to a massive scam of over Rs 30,000 crore.
Soon, his operation was discovered by the police and a counterfeit case was filed against him. Abdul Karim Telgi had sold fake stamp papers worth Rs 17 lakh, resulting in a financial scam of Rs 30,000 crore. He was soon sentenced to prison, and tested positive for HIV in 2001, passing away in 2017.
Abdul Karim Telgi’s story is now brought to life once again by Hansal Mehta in his new web series Scam 2003.
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