New Delhi, Jan 2 (PTI) Five people were arrested for allegedly impersonating DSIIDC officials to cheat some factory owners in the name of clearing their pending bills in a building project in the Bawana Industrial area of outer north Delhi, police said on Tuesday.

According to Deputy Commissioner of Police (outer north) Ravi Kumar Singh, several factory owners in the past couple of weeks had come forward with complaints at Cyber Crime Police Station about getting fake bills or receipts from DSIIDC after they paid the money.

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According to one such complaint, a business owner was defrauded of Rs 1.75 lakh he had paid towards ground rent without interest.

During investigation, police gathered the call details and bank accounts where the funds had ended up and conducted a money trail, the officer said.

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"As per trail, a raid was conducted on December 12 at Shalimar Garden, Sahibabad, Ghaziabad, UP, and one Shah Hasan Nakvi was apprehended," he said.

During Nakvi's interrogation, it was found that he was part of a gang that involved four others, since identified as Saklen Nakvi alias Asraf, Ved Prakash Tomar, Ravi Chaudhary, and Vikram Saxena.

"It was learnt that the alleged persons were using WhatsApp numbers to communicate. Through electronic surveillance and local intelligence, the team obtained the details of the IP address of apparent WhatsApp numbers, intercepted the location of all the accused persons, and arrested the other four accused," Singh said..

Police identified Vikram Saxena as the mastermind of the scam.

Saxena was earlier arrested by Delhi Police's Economic Offences Wing (EOW) in a case in 2020 but was released on bail.

He used to deal with property possession in the Delhi State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation, or DSIIDC.

His role in the scam was to provide the details of pending bills of factory owners to the other gang members, who then would make calls or send messages to these targets, police said.

Saxena, 38, and Hassan Nakvi, 32, are the residents of Ghaziabad, Ved Prakash Tomar, 48, and Ravi Chaudhary, 32, are from Delhi's Khichripur, and Saklen Nakvi, 59, is from East Vinod Nagar.

The gang cheated about Rs 25 lakh by using the same modus operandi in the past few months, police said.

(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)