4 arrested for cheating housekeeping staff of filmmaker Rohit Shetty

MUMBAI: Juhu police arrested four men for cheating Rohit Shetty's housekeeping staff of ₹25,000 in a lottery scam after nine months on the run.

MUMBAI: The Juhu police arrested four men on Saturday for allegedly cheating a housekeeping staff member of filmmaker Rohit Shetty. The men had been on the run for nine months.

4 arrested for cheating housekeeping staff of filmmaker Rohit Shetty

According to police, the gang of four, identified as Prakash Vyankatesh Naidu, Navnath Somnath Sathe, Rameshwar Rajendra Prasad Chaudhary and Raju Rajesh Maurya, had cheated the employee by luring him into buying a lottery of 25 lakh after assuring him that he would win.

The police on Saturday got a tip-off that the four were coming to Vile Parle to commit a crime, after which assistant police inspector Ranjit Chavan and his team laid a trap and arrested them.

The officer said 28-year-old Dharmjit Ramanresh Singh, a resident of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, who lives in Santosh Nagar, Hanuman Chawl, Goregaon, has been working as a housekeeping employee of Rohit Shetty for the past two years.

On April 22, 2024, around 1 pm, he was approached by an unknown person at the Vile Parle railway station skywalk. He told Singh that he had a lottery ticket of 25 lakh that was guaranteed to hit the jackpot. Another person, posing as a customer, then pretended he wanted to buy the ticket but did not have the money. At that same time, another person came up and encouraged Singh to buy the ticket. Trusting them, he agreed and ended up transferring ₹25,000 from his account to the account of a certain Dinesh Kumar Shankar Jaiswal.

When he did not win as assured, he realised that he had been cheated, after which he approached the police and registered an FIR against unknown men. While investigating the case, the police, tipped off by informers, arrested four suspects, who were wanted in connection with similar cases.

“The accused confessed to cheating Singh in the lottery scam. All four accused were arrested and produced in Andheri local court,” said an officer from Juhu police station.