Friday, April 12, 2013

Lady doc falls for magic of money, loses Rs.27 lakh

What a rotten idea, Sirji; Lady doc falls for magic of money, loses Rs.27 lakh

Mumbai: The Anti-Extortion Cell (AEC) of the Mumbai police arrested three people on Wednesday for duping a 51-year-old Ayurvedic doctor from Borivli of Rs27.5 lakh.
They promised to magically double the money. Another doctor, known to the complainant, is under the police scanner for introducing her to the con men.
Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner (crime), said the doctor in October introduced the complainant to Pawan Singh, saying he knew magic and he could double the money. And Singh could show the trick if the woman paid him Rs25,000.
The woman agreed and a hotel in Lonavla was chosen as the venue for the trick. There, she was introduced to two others, Abhishek Singh and Sirji.
Sirji took a Rs1,000 note and kept three papers of the same size on top of it, Roy said. The papers and the note were wrapped in a red cloth and kept on a glass sheet.
After doing some mumbo jumbo for 15 minutes, Sirji poured a “magic liquid” on the cloth. He then ironed the notes, held them over a dryer, and showed her three new Rs1,000 notes. Each had a different serial number — enough to convince the woman.
“They even asked her to verify the notes with any bank if she had any doubts,” Nitin Alakhnure, crime branch inspector, said.
Once she was convinced, Sirji told her that they undertook a job of doubling money only if it was at least Rs25 lakh.
In November, Abhishek Singh collected Rs2.50 lakh from her, ostensibly to buy articles needed for the magic from Nepal.
After a couple of days, they called her to the same hotel room and she reached with Rs25 lakh in cash. But this time while performing the “magic”, the glass broke. And Sirji told the woman that the “magic” had failed. “As proof, he opened the cloth and showed a couple of burnt notes,” assistant inspector Satish Mayekar said.
Though the three assured her to double the money, they started avoiding her calls after a few days. “After some time they demanded another Rs2 lakh, again to buy stuff from Nepal for the “magic”. But she refused. They then started to threaten her, saying they knew people in the IB, R&AW and Income Tax and could get her in trouble,” Sudhir Dalvi, assistant inspector, said.
The woman then lodged a complaint with the AEC. The police asked her to call them to her office for the money. Once they landed up, they were arrested.
Speaking about getting new notes in a cloth, an officer said it was just sleight of hand. Once a person is distracted, they slip in new notes or burnt ones as the case may be. These men, said the officer, told the woman they had sourced the paper from RBI and had printed serial numbers.
The arrested – Rajan Srivastava alias Sirji, 42, Pravinkumar Srivastava alias Abhishek Singh, 36, and Pawankumar Dubey alias Pawan Singh, 25 — class X dropouts are from Varanasi.

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