Kingpin of ₹300-cr bank fraud found living in Vrindavan as ‘seer’, arrested

The accused was nabbed from near Krishna Balram temple of Vrindavan in Mathura when the Maharashtra police team from Beed district traced him living there

AGRA/LUCKNOW Kingpin of a ₹300-crore bank fraud in Maharashtra, Babban Vishwanath Shinde alias ‘Babban Baba’, was arrested by the Maharashtra police with the help of local cops in UP’s Vrindavan on Tuesday. He was living at a temple here in the guise of a ‘sadhu’ (seer) for many months, said police.

Babban was wanted in multiple cases of fraud registered in Beed, Dharashiv and Mumbai between June and July 2023. (Pic for representation)

He posed as a sadhu by shaving his beard and moustache and donned a ‘kurta dhoti’. The Maharashtra police kept searching for him at different locations in Delhi, Nepal, Assam, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh. The accused was finally nabbed from near the Krishna Balram Mandir of Vrindavan in Mathura when the Maharashtra police team from Beed district traced him living there.

ASP (city), Mathura, Arvind Kumar informed that Babban was wanted in multiple cases of fraud registered in Beed, Dharashiv and Mumbai between June and July 2023. He said the Beed police sought help from the Mathura police to trace his location.

“The accused was wanted in a case registered in Beed district of Maharashtra under sections 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) of the IPC in July 2023. The Beed police has taken him along after procuring his transit remand from a local court on Wednesday for legal proceedings,” he added.

Another police official said Babban was chairman of Jijau Maasaheb Multi-State Cooperative Credit Society Limited. Its main branch was in Beed and had around 70,000 account holders, who had deposited crores of their hard-earned money in the cooperative bank. The fraud worth ₹150 crore surfaced in the bank in May 2023, which gradually rose to ₹300 crore as more people turned up to register their complaints.

He said Shinde, who had apparently sensed trouble, had disappeared from Beed on July 3, 2023, after the fraud surfaced and the FIR was lodged in the matter. Later, multiple FIRs were registered in several districts of Maharashtra, added the official.

The Maharashtra police had arrested multiple people in this multi-crore fraud, but Babban remained evasive, hiding and changing his locations from one state to another.