Man arrested for posing as builder, cheating home buyers
Man arrested for posing as builder, cheating thousands of people by promising homes in under-construction buildings and taking token amounts.
Mumbai: A man has been arrested for posing as a builder and allegedly cheating thousands of people under the pretext of promising them homes and showing them flats at under-construction buildings that he claims to be developing and asking them to pay the token amount.
The accused, Sumit Dubey, is also allegedly affiliated with the Bahujan Vikas Aaghadi (BVA) party and has been involved in several land-grabbing cases across the Vasai-Virar region.
According to police, Dubey used to introduce himself as a builder named Sachin Patil or Tushar Patil. He would allegedly show unsuspecting buyers plots or flats in under-construction projects claiming that he had developed the project. Dubey, who is a resident of Babhola naka in Vasai West, used to convince the buyers to pay the token amount anywhere between ₹10,000 to ₹10 lakh, “Sometimes the plots promised by Dubey did not even exist,” Vivek Sonawane, sub-inspector, Achole police.
On Monday, two men identified as Pravin Anant More and Mohammed Alam Ansari approached the police claiming that Dubey had taken ₹6 lakh as a token amount from them and promised two flats in the adjacent building of the police station in Vasai East.
More told the police that Dubey said he owned the flat in the building which cost ₹35 lakh. “Dubey told me that I can pay him the token amount and after one month, I can shift and keep paying him the rest of the amount in installments. When a month passed, I kept calling Dubey for possession, but he did not respond,” said More.
When More approached the flat owner, he found out that the flat did not belong to Dubey and that he had been cheated, said the police.
After the investigation, they found that Dubey had also cheated thousands of people by luring them into investing in a credit society scheme where they had to pay ₹200 daily. “I had invested ₹200 daily for months, for the delivery of my child but when my wife was admitted to the hospital Dubey stop responding to my calls,” said a man from Nalasopara who had invested ₹50,000 with Dubey with the hope of six percent returns in one month.
Sonawane said that Dubey has several cases of cheating against him in Vasai and Virar. “We have arrested Dubey for cheating and are investigating to find out how many more people Dubey has cheated,” said Sonawane.