Fake SBI branch dupes villagers: Bold 10-day scam uncovered in Chhattisgarh
A group of fraudsters opened a fake SBI branch in Chhattisgarh and minted money off of the people in the village.
In Chhapora village in Sakti district of Chhattisgarh, six individuals pulled off an audacious scam, opening an SBI bank branch in 10 days in order to intercept transactions and dupe people out of lakhs of money, reported NDTV.
In the small village of Chhapora, just 250 kms from the state capital of Raipur, these individuals furnished their ‘bank’ with cash counters, paperwork, new furniture to make it look the part.
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Villagers were invited to open accounts and start conducting transactions, while the employees were also fooled into believing they had landed a secure job.
However, soon their fraud was unveiled after the manager of an SBI bank in nearby Dabra, became suspicious. Police and SBI officials showed up on September 27 and the cat was out of the bag.
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A senior police official, Rajesh Patel, told NDTV, that three people involved in the scam have been identified - Rekha Sahu, Mandir Das and Pankaj.
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The mastermind behind the fraud not only provided counterfeit documents and fake job titles but also trained all the recruits in the bank as well. They also extorted 2-6 lakh rupees from the employees as a fee in exchange for future lucrative jobs.
One of the villagers, Ajay Kumar Agarwal, had applied for an SBI kiosk in Chhapora, and grew wary of the new SBI branch that had cropped up overnight. He brought the matter to the attention of the nearest branch at Dabra.
The managers could not find any information or branch code and eventually reported this to the police.
Their primary targets of his scam were unemployed individuals from various districts, including Korba, Balod, Kabirdham, and Sakti.
One of the employees Jyoti Yadav told NDTV, that she was promised 30,000 rupees after submitting all her documents and providing biometric data as well.
Another employee, Sangeeta Kanwar, told NDTV, "I was asked for 5 lakh rupees, but I told them I couldn't pay that much. We eventually settled for 2.5 lakh rupees. I was promised a salary of 30-35,000 rupees."