VJTI teacher cheated of ₹15L on pretext of selling house

Real estate agents and a couple have been booked for allegedly cheating a VJTI teacher on the pretext of selling a house and refusing to return a token amount of ?15 lakh.

MUMBAI: The Vile Parle police have booked two real estate agents and a couple for allegedly cheating a VJTI teacher on the pretext of selling a house and later refusing to return the token amount of ₹15 lakh that she paid them.

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The complainant, Anjali Dhiware, told the police that she got in touch with real estate agent Rajesh Yadav last year through a website where she was looking for properties on sale. He showed her the flat on the second floor of Chamunda Paradise in Vile Parle East which was owned by Narendra and Dharmishtha Tailor.

“The couple’s agent Anthony Danish was also a part of the negotiations in which it was decided that I would give a token amount of ₹15 lakh for the house priced at ₹1.5 crore. Of this, we transferred ₹1 lakh to Narendra Tailor’s account the next day. For the rest of the amount, a memorandum of understanding was signed by the agents, sellers and me at the Bandra court,” the complainant said in her statement to the police. The rest of the amount was also transferred to Tailor’s account in the next week, she said.

Dhiware said she had also applied for a home loan which was approved within the same month and spent money on legal processes and more in terms of fees of the society. When she took her parents to see the flat after that, it came to her notice that the Tailor family had pending dues of more than ₹6 lakh towards maintenance.

“During this visit, Narendrabhai also said he was not happy to sell the flat for the price we had decided earlier. Then Yadav told me they want ₹70 lakh more for the flat. When I objected saying that they should have brought it up before signing the MOU, they said they still had not received a copy of the contract from their agent,” Dhiware told the police.

Unhappy with the way they were handling the situation, the complainant told both Yadav and the Tailors that she wouldn’t want to go ahead with the deal and asked them to return the money she had given them. Despite repeated chances to return the money, the accused never gave her the money she had paid as the token amount. She lodged a complaint against them with Vile Parle police earlier this week.

An official from Vile Parle police said that Yadav and Anthony along with the Tailor couple have been booked under sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 406 (criminal breach of trust), 506-2 (criminal intimidation) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code,” said the officer.