MUMBAI: In a city with a big craze for fast cash, every day is fraught with the risk of people becoming victim to fraudulent investment schemes. Remember Aryarup Travel and Club Resort ? Aurum Realty? Yes Cube Infrastructure? The owners of all three are under investigation for soliciting investors with promises of astronomical returns, paying off old investors with money from new ones, and ultimately reneging on their deals.
Such schemes seem to recur with regularity. To prevent this, the economic offences wing (EOW) of the police will educate cops from the city's 90 police stations to investigate white-collar crime. "Police personnel are taught to detect crime during their training (at the time of joining the force). But the trend in crime is changing, with new strategies emerging everyday. To prevent fraud and scam, we need to educate police personnel about the modus operandi of such crime and investigating them," said a police officer who will be part of the EOW's training programme on May 25 and 26.
While the programme will focus on investment fraud, it will also touch upon bank, credit card and online transaction fraud, medical and jewellery scams, and education , housing and job rackets. The EOW has sought nominations from zonal deputy commissioners for the programme, which is expected to be attended by around 100 police officers.
"Most policemen don't know what an invoice , a bill or a hundi is. These are common terms, but they become a problem when complicated fraud is reported at police stations," the officer said. "Cops are used to cases like murder, dacoity and robbery . But when they are transferred from police stations to the EOW, they take three or four months to learn to investigate economic offences . If they are trained in advance , it will help save time, and help in the fast detection of crime and the filing of chargesheets."
The programme—to be organized by additional commissioner of police Sanjay Saxena—will also benefit cops not slated for an EOW posting. While the EOW investigates frauds where the amount is above Rs 50 lakh, police stations handle frauds up to that limit. But to deal with the cases , cops at the police stations often approach the EOW since they do not know how to investigate white-collar crime.
The economic offences wing (EOW) of the police has been provided with additional personnel to nab the directors of Aryarup Travel and Club Resort, suspected to have launched various fraudulent investment schemes. The EOW is on the lookout for Ravindra Deshmukh and his wife Vasuda. The fresh impetus in the case has been provided by the recent suicide of an Aryarup agent who had collected over Rs 5 crore in Goa and was under pressure from investors to pay up. The fraud came to light when a Mumbaibased businessman lodged a complaint with the EOW stating that Aryarup duped him of Rs 81 lakh with promises of fast money and handsome profits. "Senior officers have provided additional manpower to the investigating team to nab the suspects. More victims who lost money in the investment scheme are coming forward to lodge complaints," said a police officer. "The agent who committed suicide belonged to Latur. He ended his life when he realized he couldn't pay the investors back. A case has been registered with the Goa police."
The Deshmukhs floated several schemes in Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Maharashtra . Through Aryarup, they would lure people with a promise of 86% return on investment and commission if others were brought in. For a while, they kept their promise, but all of a sudden stopped making payments.
An EOW officer said Aryarup could have more than one lakh investors in the country, 15,000 being in Maharashtra, where the Deshmukhs started schemes in Mumbai , Navi Mumbai, Thane, Buldana, Nashik, Nanded, Parbhani, Jalgaon , Bhusawal, Pune and Latur.
In February, the EOW, acting on a court order, attached two Deshmukh-owned plots totalling 75 acres and worth Rs 12 crore. One, measuring 50 acres, was near the Jaipur airport and the other in Murbad.
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