Investors sensed scams months before Miyapur

Months before the Miyapur scam came to light, investors who were looking to put money into Hyderabad real estate had begun to back off deals when they heard the names ‘Goldstone’ or ‘P.S. Prasad’. Some of those investors now say they sensed scams after they heard stories of Prasad selling the same property to multiple buyers and cheating them. In 2014, when Cyrus Investments revoked the power of attorney given to Prasad after he sold properties without the company’s consent, many investors who had trusted Prasad had burnt fingers.

Senior Telangana police officials were also aware that Prasad figured in dozens of land disputes and litigations in Hyderabad, but they had never been able to build a strong case against him. Even in the newest Miyapur land scam, probe officials are struggling to find evidence against him. “Whenever a major land scam or dispute happens in the city, we inevitably hear Prasad’s name being mentioned. Yet, it has been hard to build a case against him. That’s how he operates,” said a senior police officer.

Prasad’s modus operandi is to find loopholes in land purchase deals, file suites in court and obtain General Power of Attorney (GPA) to gain control of the lands, police said.

People who have known Prasad for long say he was trained as a doctor before he began pulling off scams in the US.

After graduating from Gandhi Medical College in India in 1970 and completing a residency in Binghamton, New York, he had started a practice in medicine in South Carolina.

According to David Mildenberg, a reporter at Business North Carolina magazine, who wrote an investigative story on Prasad’s scams in the US, Prasad had converted to Christianity while in America and was a generous supporter of Trinity Free Will Baptist Church before US law agencies started chasing him.