India News | Man Arrested in GK for Duping Elderly of Lakhs in Call Centre Scam

New Delhi, Jul 20 (PTI) A 32-year-old man was arrested for allegedly duping senior citizens on the pretext of providing 10X bonus on maturity of insurance policies, police said on Wednesday.

The accused, Virender Sahni, is a resident of Greater Kailash, they said.

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On June 27, an 82-year-old retired professor had lodged a complaint with police, saying that he had been contacted by a man in 2019, who identified himself as Sandeep Tyagi, DGM, RBI, Lucknow, a senior police officer said.

The man told him that his insurance policies had been taken up for maturity and he would get Rs 90 lakh in return, the officer said.

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He then asked the complainant to pay Rs 1.5 lakh as processing charges,. The complainant complied with the request, police said.

Thereafter, the so-called DGM kept on asking for more money, and by the end of the scam had squeezed around Rs 90 lakh from him, police said.

After the complaint, police investigated the matter and traced the location of the accused.

On Monday, a raid was conducted and Sahni was apprehended, Deputy Commissioner of Police (south) Benita Mary Jaiker said.

Sahni told police that he had been working at an insurance data collection call centre and in 2015 started approaching clients on his own opening a call centre with the help of 2-3 of his associates.

At this call centre, they collected the insurance, and made detailed profiles of potential targets for cheating, police said.

The accused would get SIM cards and open bank accounts on fake addresses to withdraw the cheated money. Once, they got the account kits, they would change its PIN and mobile number through net banking after getting the one time passwords from their clients, police said.

In 2016, Sahni had a dispute with his partners and he went solo.

During their run, Sahni was found to have cheated one Desi Razu Sundra Shiva Rao, 72, from Bengaluru of Rs 50 lakh.

After Rao, he made one Inderbadan Zaved Bhai Patel from Vadodara, Gujarat his target, whom he cheated of around Rs 20 lakh, police said.

Sahni used to lure his targets with an offer of 10 to 20 times maturity or bonus benefits on total savings.

According to police, after gaining their confidence, he would ask the target to deposit a complex figure such as Rs 1,76,524 as file charge to make the request seem genuine, police said.

One luxury car, diamond jewellery around Rs 15 lakh, Rs 2.5 lakh in bank account etc were recovered from his possession, they added.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)