Ahmedabad: Man cheats bank of Rs 8.32 lakh by impersonation

AHMEDABAD: The branch manager of a nationalized bank on Tuesday filed a complaint for breach of trust and cheating against a man who impersonated the owner of a car dealership on SG Road, and made the bank staff transfer Rs 8.32 lakh to a certain account.
The branch manager of the SG Road of SBI, Tilakraj Ahuja (37), a resident of Vastrapur, on Tuesday filed the complaint with Vastrapur police, stating that he had on Monday afternoon received a call from a man who introduced himself as Mayank Bajpayi.
“The man told Ahuja that he had a current account in the name of Landmark Cars Private Limited. He then told Ahuja that he just had only one cheque which he needed to submit for a fixed deposit. He further said that he urgently needed to transfer Rs 8.32 lakh to another account of a person named Naushad Alam, for which he also sent an email requesting the fund transfer,” states the FIR of the case.
To play the owner of the car dealership, the man told Ahuja to come to his office as he wanted to raise his credit limit. The man had also sent an email to the bank requesting them to transfer the money. When the bank staff checked the email containing the account number, they found the number to be real and belonging to the car dealership, the FIR states.
After a while, the man called Ahuja and him about the fund transfer. He later also sent a request for it on the WhatsApp number of the branch manager. Ahuja then told a staffer of his, Arunkumar Tirki, to look into the email and do what was needed. At around 4pm on Monday, Tirki transferred the money to the account number given. The man was constantly calling Ahuja asking him to go to his office, the FIR states.
At around 5pm on Monday, a man from the car dealership approached the bank and asked how the money had been debited from their account. When Ahuja narrated the sequence of events, the dealership employee told him that Mayank Bajpayi was in Mumbai and not in Ahmedabad. The employee told Ahuja that the email id from which the email was sent and the phone number from which the calls were made did not belong to the dealership.
Realizing that he had been cheated, Ahjuja examined the fund transfer and found that the money was transferred to one Naushad Alam’s account and had been transferred to various other accounts after that. He then approached Vastrapur police and filed a complaint of cheating and breach of trust.