‘Fake’ Oxford professor arrested
BHUBANESWAR: His visiting card says he teaches at Oxford and is a recipient of the Order of British Empire (OBE), one of the top honours given by the Queen. And his website says he is an India-born, award-winning British writer.
In reality, 27-year-old Avinash Patra is a fraudster from Odisha’s coastal Kendrapara district.
Police arrested him on Friday for duping pharmacy owner Umesh Agarwal of ₹70 lakh in western Odisha’s Nuapara district.
Patra took the money between 2009 and 2013, promising big returns from Microsoft in the UK.
When the businessman pressed for his money, Patra gave Agarwal a letter with forged signatures of a senior IAS officer in September 2016.
The letter says Agarwal will get ₹2.19 crore from JPMorgan Chase Bank of UK.
As the businessman began making enquiries, the forgery came to the police’s notice and they alerted state rural development secretary and special relief commissioner Bishnupada Sethi, whose initials the fraudster had copied on the letter.
Police said Patra was taken into custody in Bhubaneswar after the top bureaucrat’s complaint.
A letter pad and rubber stamp were seized from him.
Patra has the gift of the gab and is quite eloquent in convincing people about his fake British identity.
He befriended Agarwal during a visit to Nuapara and proposed the investment options.
The pharmacy owner was taken in by the words of “an Oxford University professor and an author”, police said in a statement regarding the arrest.
Calling himself an OBE, Patra had suffixed the title before his name on his Twitter handle.
“He even has his own website, www.avinashpatra.com, where he describes himself as an Indiaborn British writer and winner of British Writer of the Year 2010 award,” an officer said.
Investigation revealed Patra had faked an invitation from the Buckingham Palace for the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey in April 2011.
He took the local media for a ride flaunting the “wedding invitation”, saying he was a secondyear graduation student in Indology in a New York university.