FARIDABAD GANG FORGED PAPERS, SOLD FLATS TO POCKET ₹4 CRORE
GOVT SCHEMES TARGETED Police said the four suspects would pose as Huda officials to obtain details from allottees of affordable housing schemes and execute the sale through GPAS
GURUGRAM: In December 2018, 44-year-old businessman Dharamvir Singh from Faridabad’s Nawada village came to Ballabhgarh to check on his 545square yard plot. The plot was as he had left it, but there was a problem: it had been sold to someone else.
From this case, the Faridabad Police unearthed a complex crime that involved people disguising themselves as government officials and forging general power of attorney (GPA) papers to sell housing units under the government’s affordable housing scheme at exorbitant prices.
To date, the police have detected more than 20 such cases with a total transaction of around ₹4 crore.
On Tuesday, the police said they busted the gang with the arrest of four persons, including the suspected kingpin of the racket. The police said they recovered 56 blank paper stamp and rubber stamps of several government departments, including those sub divisional magistrates of Haryana from their possession.
The suspects were identified as alleged kingpin Amit Bainsla of Ghaziabad, Rajesh Kumar from Delhi, Srikant Verma and Amit Mehta from Faridabad. The police said they all had several fraud cases registered against them in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.
They were arrested from different places and were remanded to seven-day custody by the Faridabad Police.
The police said the gang used to procure the list of allottees of affordable housing projects in Haryana. Posing as officials of the Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda), (now Haryana Shahari Vikas Pradhikaran), they would allegedly approach the allottees and would demand photocopies of documents, such as ration cards, voter ID cards, and PAN cards. They would then allegedly use these documents to get GPA papers made in Noida.
Faridabad police commissioner KK Rao said the gang is likely to have forged more than 300 GPAS and sold flats for ₹8 lakh to ₹12 lakh, despite each unit costing only ₹3.5 lakh.
HOW THE RACKET WAS UNEARTHED
When Dharamvir Singh found out how his land was sold, he approached the police and registered a case.
“During our investigation, we learnt that the land had been transferred to a resident of Sector 23 in Faridabad. The complainant could not identify him and told the police that he did not sell the land to anyone,” commissioner Rao said. “We then tracked the four suspects.”
The police tracked down Amit Bainsla of Delhi who allegedly posed as Dharamvir Singh while executing the GPA in favour of the buyer. Rao said the suspects transferred the GPAS at the tehsil office in Noida through impersonation and using forged records.
HOW POLICE BUSTED THE RACKET
The police started scanning the call records of Bainsla and tracked Rajesh Kumar of Delhi. Three teams were formed to investigate the case. One team raided Bainsla’s Delhi house, and allegedly recovered 60 rubber stamps and 56 old duty stamps.
Early Tuesday, three teams, including the station house officer, raided the houses of the four suspects and arrested them. Bainsla allegedly revealed their modus operandi to the police and confessed to the crime.
NOT THE ONLY CASE
More than 50 victims approached the police during the investigation. Rao said they discovered documents that reveal that the gang had fraudulently sold at least 100 flats and land between 2014 and 2019.
In most cases, Amit Mehta and Srikant Verma were allegedly made witnesses during the registration and their fake addresses would be in Delhi, Noida, and Faridabad. “Stamp papers on which the GPAS were scribed were issued in the name of a rural bank in Faridabad and the photographs presented were of independent witnesses and that of fake owners, in whose name the flats ware allotted,” Rao said.
The Noida police are also investigating the case.
A case under sections 419 (impersonation), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using forged document as genuine) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and 201 ( destroying evidence) of the Indian Penal Code was registered against the suspects at Mujesar police station in Faridabad.
A similar case was registered in Gurugram in April last year and seven people were arrested from different parts of Haryana, including Jind, the police said.