Maid steals Rs 32 lakh from CA’s home over 5 months, held

Ghaziabad: A 32-year-old domestic help who allegedly stole cash and jewellery worth Rs 32 lakh over the past five months from her employer’s flat in an upscale highrise in Indirapuram’s Vaibhav Khand, was arrested on Tuesday after CCTV cameras, secretly installed in the house, captured her in the act last week.
The accused has been identified as Suman. Cash and jewellery worth over Rs 25 lakh have been recovered from her possession. She has confessed to the crime, police said.

Suman had been working at the house of Abhishek Mathur, a chartered accountant, in Shipra Sapphire Society for the past five months. Since then, he started noticing cash going missing from his home. When thousands of money began disappearing from the cupboard after every few days, he secretly installed a CCTV camera in his bedroom.

“I got a CCTV camera installed and on Thursday, when I was going through the footage, I saw Suman opening the cupboard and stealing money,” Mathur told TOI. “I chose not to react and let her steal for one more day. Armed with video evidence, I approached police on Friday and subsequently got an FIR lodged,” he added.

Police said Suman was picked up from her Vijay Nagar home, where she lives with her family.

“Mathur being a CA used to bring home cash and Suman got the whiff of it. But she never took more than a few thousands in one go and over the months she stole some Rs 30 lakh cash and jewellery worth Rs 2 lakh,” said Dharmender Chauhan, DSP, Indirapuram.

“When we went to her house on Tuesday morning, she was packing her bags. It seems she had got suspicious. We recovered Rs 22,80,000 cash along with some ornaments worth Rs 2 lakh from her possession,” he added.

Initially she told cops that she got the money by selling off a plot in her ancestral village. “But on sustained interrogation, she broke down and confessed to having committed the crime. She has been charged under Section 381 of IPC (theft by servant),” an official said.