Fake toll pass scam: Three more held; DU student among suspects involved in planning

Gurugram: The police on Wednesday arrested three more persons for their alleged involvement in printing and selling fake monthly passes to cab drivers at the Gurugram-Delhi

Gurugram: The police on Wednesday arrested three more persons for their alleged involvement in printing and selling fake monthly passes to cab drivers at the Gurugram-Delhi border.

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On September 5, the alleged mastermind behind the scam, Satywart Kundu, 39, a former staffer in the vigilance team of MEP Infrastructure Developers, the contractor that collects toll, was arrested for allegedly selling 700 fake monthly passes at discounted prices to driver partners of cab aggregators. The police have arrested nine people so far in the case. The probe has also revealed the involvement of a female student of Delhi University (DU), who is yet to be arrested.

Subhash Boken, police spokesperson, said that the woman had given the address of the printing press, where the duplicate passes were printed, to the mastermind. She was involved in the planning to get some toll officials terminated by implicating them in a fake case and replacing them with their accomplices.

“She had met him at his rented house in DLF Phase-3. As per their planning, she went to the toll plaza and deliberately picked up a fight with the staff. She reported the incident to the police. The intention was to file a case against the staff, so that they leave their jobs and the suspects can run their operations by employing their aides at the toll plaza. However, when the police conducted the investigation and checked the CCTV footage, they did not find any evidence and no case was registered,” said Boken.

The arrested suspects have been identified by their first names as Ankit, Chanchal and Rakesh. Ankit runs a photostat shop in Delhi while Chanchal and Rakesh are former employees of the contractor and worked with Kundu in the vigilance team.

The police said that their probe had revealed that Kundu and his accomplices had printed 1,200 duplicate passes from a printing press in Delhi and sold these passes, which had a face value of ₹3,000 each, to cab drivers at ₹2,700.

Boken said the DU student and the person who was printing the duplicate passes are presently at large. The police is checking the details of bank accounts of the arrested suspects to ascertain the scale of the alleged scam, adding that ₹4 lakh cash had been recovered from the possession of the kingpin so far.

The mastermind of the alleged scam, Kundu, had quit his job and called a cab aggregator in Sector 29, requesting the aggregator for a help desk to sell monthly passes at a discounted price, following which 700 fraudulent bar-coded stickers were sold to drivers over a period of three days.

The incident was reported on September 4, after a senior official of the toll plaza at Rajokri filed a police complaint at the Udyog Vihar police station. In the complaint, the official said that while checking the barcode on the toll passes of commercial vehicles at the toll, they intercepted six vehicles, who had been using duplicate passes.

After a case was registered, the police arrested five drivers from the Sirhaul toll plaza on September 4. During questioning, the drivers had told the police that they were unaware that the passes were fake and that they had purchased the passes from a supervisor, who is yet to be arrested, at a discount of ₹300 per pass.

The police said that so far, the passes that have been duplicated do not comprise RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags but only the monthly passes issued for cars.