As many as eight persons were arrested by Bondamunda police on Friday allegedly for duping a number of persons in the name of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) and took more than crores of rupees from them. Police are further investigating the case.
According to sources, during the year 2014 when KBC show was going on , a racket was active and its master mind was Umar Ali(42), a native of Pipda of Gopalganj district in Bihar. He was operating from Delhi and persuaded unemployed youths to open accounts in the ICICI bank and hand over him the original ATM card and passbook with password. He ran a call centre at Delhi and used to give message at random to the public by seeing that they have won a lottery cash of Rs 25 lakh in KBC show and asked to deposit Rs 1 lakh- Rs 2 lakh for processing fee and give the account number of unemployed youths to deposit the money.
When the money was deposited, Ali used to withdraw the same by using ATM card. The unemployed youths who had opened the account and had handed over the ATM card to Ali had the knowledge that their accounts will be utilized for cheating purpose but in spite of that they used to open the account and handed over the ATM cards to get Rs 3,000 per month as assured by Ali. In this way, they cheated crores of rupees from innocent people.
A case had been registered in Delhi police special cell in which main accused Ali and Sarojkant Sutar of Bondamunda had been arrested and forwarded to court by Delhi police in 2014. Delhi police had recovered 138 ATM cards and had also seized Rs 4 lakh from them.
Recently, the Economic Offences Wing, Crime Branch , Odisha had informed the Rourkela police about some suspicious bank accounts in the ICICI bank at Rourkela and the police after investigating had traced eight accounts of eight persons where transaction had been made in different times. The Bondamunda police arrested Santosh Balkrishna Rao Pentakota (26), a resident of Bondamunda, Rohit Kumar (23), a resident of Bondamunda, Bikash Sahoo (23), a resident of Bisra, Suresh Saha(25), a resident of Sundargarh, Dhiren Rout (27), a resident of Bondamunda, Dilip Saha (36), a resident of Bondamunda, Ramdas Besra(27), a resident of Bondamunda and Sandeep alias Sambit Swain(35), a resident of Jajpur.