The Delhi Police on Wednesday said it has busted a gang of thieves that used to steal expensive mobile phones shipped by Flipkart, while these were being transported from one godown to the other. Four members of the gang were arrested and 30 cellphones of various brands worth around Rs 2.5 lakh were recovered from them.

Police said the arrested men, who are employees of different transport companies, in the last fortnight had stolen 150 mobile phones while transporting them from Flipkart’s delivery office to warehouses in Delhi-NCR. A case was registered at the Alipur police station on the complaint of Maan Singh, manager of Flipkart security team.

According to Singh, the theft could not be detected initially as the thieves were stealing two or three mobile phone packets from several containers, each containing about 6,000 to 7,000 phones. “But when around 20 mobile phones were stolen from a container during the delivery of the consignment on February 17-18, we carried out an audit and found that around 150 phone packets were stolen from various consignments over the last two weeks. We then filed a case,” Singh said.

A crime branch team was roped in to probe the case. On Wednesday, the team received information that some persons would come to Pochanpur area near Dwarka to sell stolen phones. A trap was laid and four men were arrested with 30 stolen mobile phones. They were identified as Santosh Kumar, Brij Mohan, Akhilesh alias Guddu, and Ranjit, said additional commissioner of police (crime) Rajiv Ranjan.

During questioning, additional CP Ranjan said the arrested men disclosed that they were drivers by profession and worked with different transport companies in Delhi and Gurugram. “Santosh is the gang leader. He and Mohan were previously named in a similar case wherein 100 sugar bags were stolen from a truck,” Ranjan said.

First Published: Feb 21, 2019 11:09 IST