Six men pose as IT officials to cheat trader, arrested

NEW DELHI: For six men, it was a near-perfect con plan that went horribly wrong.

Posing as income tax officials, the plan was to cheat a businessman’s family and flee with their cash and jewellery. On Sunday, in a vehicle bearing the Haryana government’s sticker, the six alleged conmen knocked at the door of a south Delhi businessman. With the air of importance that usually surrounds officers on government duty, the men first took away the cell phones of the businessman’s family members, warning them that the IT team was there to investigate a charge of tax evasion worth over ₹20 crore.

The men would have succeeded in their plan too had a family member of the businessman not found their behaviour suspicious and raised an alarm. A crowd of around 150 locals soon gathered outside the trader’s house and the fake IT sleuths were nabbed, roughed up, interrogated, made to apologise and later handed over to the police.

The incident was reported from Malviya Nagar on Sunday around 9am. Family members told police that the six men had come in a Tata Safari car that had a Haryana government’s sticker fixed on the windscreen. CCTV footage recovered from the colony showed one of their associates in a Honda City car waiting outside the house.

At around 9.05 am, the men, some of them carrying files, knocked at the door of Ramesh Chand, a Malviya Nagar-based businessmen dealing in electronic goods. The men then took away the mobile phones of the family members alleging that they had come on government duty to investigate a tax evasion charge of ₹20 crores.

Police said they are probing the role the role of an insider .