FAKE COURIER AGENT ARRESTED FOR FLEEING WITH ROYAL ENFIELD
MUMBAI: A man was arrested on Thursday for cheating a 38-year-old man of ₹4.74 lakh by pretending to be a courier agent and promising to transport his Royal Enfield bike to Chhattisgarh.
The accused, Mohit Kanojia, took the bike on February 12 and signed the invoice, which was recorded by the complainant and helped the police track the accused within a month.
According to the police, the complainant, Wasim Baba Shaikh, is a resident of Malwani Malad. Shaikh wanted to sell his bike, for which he posted an advertisement on an online buying and selling website. Shortly, a man from Chhattisgarh contacted Shaikh, and after a conversation, the two struck a deal.
The buyer paid ₹90,000 for the bike in advance and told Shaikh that after he transported the bike and sent him an invoice from the courier company, he would transfer the rest of the amount.
Shaikh then searched for a courier company on the internet and found a service agent in Sakinaka. The agent picked up the bike and gave Shaikh an invoice, after which the buyer sent him the remaining amount.
Two days after the transaction, the buyer called Shaikh saying, that he had not received the bike and demanded his money back. A confused Shaikh contacted the service agent and received a reply that they had not transported any bike to Chhattisgarh.
Shaikh then went to Sakinaka, and to his shock, there was no shop located there as given in the internet search. Shaikh then approached the police and registered a case against an unidentified person.
“When the agent picked up the bike for delivery, Shaikh had recorded a video of him signing the invoice,” said a police officer from Malwani police station. The police officers alerted their informers, after which they received a tip-off that the accused was in Sakinaka. The police set a trap and arrested Kanojia. “We arrested Kanojia and produced him before the court on Friday. We are now tracing the bike and finding out how many more people he had cheated and if he had accomplices who helped him in setting up a fake website on Internet search,” said the officer.