VERAVAL, Oct 5 : Police today arrested a sales manager of a private bank in Gujarat’s Veraval town along with two of his subordinates, including a woman, for allegedly cheating the bank of at least Rs 2 crore by replacing the gold jewellery deposited by customers with fake one, an official said.
A case was registered on Wednesday in Veraval in Gir Somnath district based on a complaint lodged by Ram Solanki, the manager of Axis Bank’s local branch, police said. The total amount involved in the fraud is likely to go up to Rs 9 crore as 10 packets containing jewellery are yet to be thoroughly checked by the bank officials, they said.
The arrested bank staffers were identified as sales manager of the gold loan department of the branch, Mansingh Gadhiya and his subordinates Vipul Rathod and Pinky Khemchandani, the police said. “They were booked on the charges of cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy, among others,” Gir Somnath district Superintendent of Police Manoharsinh Jadeja said. He said the action against them was taken after the bank’s officials recently came across a suspected fraud in the gold loan department of their Veraval branch.
“After a preliminary inquiry, the branch manager lodged a complaint against three staffers of the bank. This entire fraud was being carried out by the trio for the last two years,” he said. As per the FIR, the fraud was detected by a senior bank official, who was on a surprise visit to the branch a week ago. During the inspection, he found that the weight of some of the packets carrying gold jewellery, deposited by customers to avail loan, was less than what should have been. The packets were kept in the vault only after ascertaining that the gold was real, it said. The bank official also found that labels on some of the packets were tampered with. When the officials checked packets one by one with the help of a valuer the next day, they found that six packets contained fake jewellery, which means that real gold jewellery worth Rs 2 crore was replaced with fake jewellery after the purity check was done, the FIR added. In all, there are 426 packets which would undergo valuation again and it may take another week.
The FIR stated that 10 packets were found to be suspicious during the preliminary probe, according to the police. “Whenever the packets containing valuables arrived at the bank’s branch following a purity audit, the trio used to unseal them and replace the real gold with the fake one. The accused would then send a dummy customer to the bank to avail loan using that real gold which they had stolen earlier,” the SP said.
“The police suspect that they disbursed loans to nearly 400 such fake customers using this modus operandi and the cheating amount may go up to Rs 8 crore to 9 crore,” he said. (PTI)
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