STF busts factory making tampered weighing machine busted, 1 arrested

LUCKNOW: Two days after the Special Task Force (STF) uncovered a gang involved in tampering of weighing machines, it busted a factory where these machines were made in Krishnanagar area of Lucknow and arrested the factory owner.

Confirming the development, a senior STF official said, “We came to know about the factory during interrogation of the five gang members arrested on Saturday. We have arrested the factory owner, one Asfaq Ali, and have seized the factory.”

The team recovered more than 170 tampered weighing machines from the factory along with large amount of raw material used to manufacture them.

On Saturday, four persons were arrested from Lucknow’s Nagram police station limits and one from Barabanki district for their involvement in the racket that supplied tampered scales to shopkeepers.

Inspector general (IG) of police, UP STF, Amitabh Yash said the racket, operating in several districts across the state, was involved in installing electronic chips in the weighing machines that enabled the cheat to reset its

setting using remote devices. He said several teams had been collecting inputs manually for the past many weeks that led to recent arrests. Sharing further details, deputy SP, STF, Amit Kumar Nagar said those arrested from Lucknow’s Nagram were identified as Harmeet Singh alias Preet, Ram Kishan, Ram Vilas Maurya and Lal Bahadur.

He said Lal Bahadur had a grocery store where three others had come to install the chip in the weighing machine and were arrested red-handed.

On their revelation, the fifth accused identified as Dinesh

Upadhyaya was arrested from Loni Katra police station limits of Barabanki district. He said several devices and chips used to manipulate electronic weighing machines’s calibration were recovered from the arrested people. Nagar said the device was remote-controlled so the shopkeepers using it could easily correct the calibration when any costumer suspected the weighing process while on other occasions they easily cheated people. He said the remote used to be in key ring shape so nobody suspected that the shopkeeper was changing the calibration.