PNB manager, 4 others held for stealing from customers
A senior Punjab National Bank (PNB) manager and four others have been arrested by the Delhi Police for allegedly siphoning off money from bank accounts using cloned cheques, police said on Tuesday. Police said the gang was working across the country.
The mastermind, Chirag Chaudhary, a debt-ridden restaurant owner from central Delhi, is currently in the US. Police said Chaudhary fled after he realised police were after his syndicate. Senior police officers said that they are in the process of issuing a look out circular (LOC) against Chaudhary.
The five men had recently siphoned off ₹95 lakh from the PNB account of a south Delhibased NGO and transferred the amount to another account of the bank in Haryana’s Kurukshetra using a cloned cheque and forged signatures, said police.
Police said the men in connivance with bank officials accessed confidential database of highvalued bank accounts and used it to prepare duplicate cheques for siphoning off money from such accounts.
The arrested persons were identified as Pritam Das, senior PNB manager from south Delhi’s Khanpur branch, Gaurav Kumar Goel, Ashish Kumar Parashar, Amarjeet Singh and Sunil Sharma. Over 80 duplicate cheques of various public and private banks, fake stamps and samples of signatures of genuine account holders and other items used for cloning cheques were recovered from them.
Despite several calls and a text message, there was no response from PNB over the issue.
Chinmoy Biswal, additional deputy commissioner of police (south district), said that the gang had accessed 30 bank accounts of 17 public and private banks in cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Dibrugarh, and Chandigarh. During the investigation into the complaint filed by the NGO, police learnt that a cloned cheque was used to transfer ₹95 lakh to an account of the bank in Haryana’s Kurukshetra.
“The complainant told us that the money was transferred even when the original cheque was in their possession and it was never issued to anybody. The account in which the money was transferred belonged to a private firm in Kurukshetra. We nabbed the firm owner, Amarjeet Singh, and interrogated him,” said Biswal.
Singh revealed that the cheque in question had been given to him by one Rajiv Gupta and his associates. He admitted that he agreed for the money transfer in his account after they accused promised to give him a commission of ₹30 lakh. Singh, however, did not know anything about Gupta except the registration number of the Volkswagen car in which they travelled.
“The car was sold to five different persons. But we managed to track the present owner, Gaurav Kumar Goel. Goel confessed to contacting Singh by impersonating himself as Rajiv Gupta. Several duplicate cheques and other incriminating materials were recovered from him,” Biswal said, adding Goel’s interrogation led to the other accused.
Goel prepared forged cheques on commission basis. The cheques were made available to him for ‘sale’ by a network of operators, primary among them was Chirag Chaudhary of Delhi.