Two days after YouTuber Lakshay Chaudhary and many others levelled serious allegations of fraud and embezzlement of funds against him, Swad Official’s Gaurav Wasan, whose video of the octogenarian owner of ‘Baba ka Dhaba’ had gone viral on the internet, has uploaded a video, presenting his side of the story and rubbishing the allegations as baseless and motivated.
In the video, Wasan emphasised that he was stirred by the plight of Kanta Prasad and his wife, after which he decided to create a video and appeal to his viewers to support the duo’s local eatery in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar. The video went instantly viral with a torrent of support pouring in from the people, including celebrities who shared the video and urged people to help ‘Baba Ka Dhaba’.
Scores of Delhites then flocked to ‘Dhaba ka Dhaba’ and from once being a moribund eatery, it transformed into a bustling local food joint, having serpentine queues of people waiting to order their choice of food. Help also came online, with many people making generous contributions to the bank accounts shared by Gaurav.
Gaurav shows details of his bank passbook to declare his innocence
Wasan shows his ICICI bank’s passbook details in the video, though the particulars were grainy and illegible. While scrolling through his passbook, Wasan said that he had uploaded the video on October 7 and on the same day he started receiving monetary donations from the people. He contends that his books are clean and that he is soon going to release his bank statement.
Gaurav further mentions that on October 8, Kanta Prasad started sharing his bank accounts with others. The support he received from his well-wishers was so overwhelming that within a day, he received donations into the tunes of lakhs and therefore his account was seized.
“On October 8, people started making donations to Baba (Kanta Prasad)’s account directly. Within hours, he was receiving not in thousands but in lakhs. The bank therefore seized his account because of such huge donations,” Gaurav said.
Money collected through online campaign given to Baba: Gaurav Wasan
Gaurav adds that he has so far collected Rs 3.35 lakhs through the campaign, and this amount was provided to Baba in the form of a bank cheque. However, he acknowledged that he was late in transferring the amount to Baba.
To defend his tardiness, Gaurav also added an old clip where he is seen requesting people to stop donating to ‘Baba ka Dhaba’ since they have achieved their target. The clip features Kanta Prasad who is seen humbly asking people to support others in need.
Regarding the allegations of online scamming levelled against him, Gaurav said that the accusations against are motivated and done with the express purpose to pull him down. However, he added that food vlogging is his passion and he would remain resilient against such attempts made to slander him and spread negativity about him.
“Against the wishes of the donors who did not want their details be made public, I will release my bank statement tomorrow. I have nothing to hide. I am thankful to those who have come out and supported our initiatives and I would request others to stop spreading negativity,” Gaurav said.
Wasan also embedded a small video of Kanta Prasad admitting to him that the money pooled is safe with the food vlogger and that whenever he would feel the need for money, he will ask Gaurav to transfer the amount to his account.
Towards the end, he shared transactions of amounts he had received during the online campaign. Curiously, the transaction IDs of all the three transaction details he had shared bore the same number.
Several netizens pointed this out, given that transaction ID is a unique alpha-numeric string, separate for each transaction. With the transaction IDs being same, many social media users have alleged that something is amiss.
That fraud food blogger has released a Excel sheet in the name of bank statement and someone even donated “0” rupees to him, bankers, is it possible? And lastly, he showed 2 different transactions of different dates but with same transaction ID 🤦🏻♂️ kitna jhoot bolega re baba? pic.twitter.com/vPO1yuXsIS
— Madhur (@ThePlacardGuy) October 28, 2020
YouTuber Lakshay Chaudhary makes explosive allegations of fraud against Gaurav Wasan
On Monday this week, video was released by a YouTuber called Lakshay Chaudhary in which he raised awareness about online scamming done by individuals who run online donation campaigns by uploading emotional videos. In his video, Chaudhary had alleged that Gaurav Wasan of ‘Swad Official’ sought donations from people on the pretext of helping ‘Baba ka Dhaba’ owners. But the money was not shared with him.
In his interview with Chaudhary, the 80-year-old ‘Baba ka Dhaba’ owner Kanta Prasad admitted that he had so far not received a single dime from the donations sought by Gaurav for ‘Baba ka Dhaba’.
Chaudhary alleged in his video that Gaurav Wasan, who ran an online campaign seeking monetary assistance for ‘Baba ka Dhaba’ did not transfer the collected amount to Kanta Prasad. He further added that Gaurav had asked people on his YouTube channel to contact him for helping Kanta Prasad and shared his personal bank accounts for donations, instead of providing Kanta Prasad’s bank details for people to contribute.