One of the crooks is a retired Air Force captain; they were held for demanding Rs15 lakh from businessman to ‘settle deal’.
Even the police were surprised when they unravelled an ingenious con job and found that it had been executed by — not some penniless youth — but by two extremely well-off businessmen and an employee of one of them. The three posed as sleuths from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and extorted money from victims to ‘settle deals’.
Their game was, however, neatly wrapped up by the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) after one of their victims decided to approach the real police.
The accused have been identified as Prasanna Mehta, a businessman, his employee Sashank Dinkar and Suryakanth Helkar, a retired Air Force captain who also owns five companies in Pune. They were arrested for demanding Rs15 lakh from the complainant, a software businessman. The trio has been remanded in police custody till June 19.
According to the CBI, the trio had entered into a deal with the complainant to sell his software to a UK-based multinational company. When he failed to get the money for the deal, he asked Mehta, who coolly replied that the CBI was after them to settle the case as it had allegedly found technical problems with the transaction.
“A couple of days later, Helkar called up the complainant posing as a CBI officer, Ram Singh, and told him to either pay Rs15 lakh or come to the CBI office,” said Rishiraj Singh, joint director, ACB, CBI.
After ‘negotiations’, the three accused settled for Rs10 lakh, and on June 2, the complainant handed over the money to Dinkar, who transferred it to Hyderabad through Hawala, said CBI officials.
Searches of their office revealed several stolen PAN cards. Police say the trio’s modus operandi was to conduct market research of businessmen who desperately needed money to pump into their projects. “They would then approach them and convince them that they could easily arrange for the money and boasted of contacts with influential people,” said Abhin Modak, superintendent of police, ACB, CBI.
Preliminary investigations revealed that the trio had duped several businessmen across India under various assumed identities.
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