Two members of an inter-state gang from Bihar which was cheating people on the promise of getting them medical college seats in Bengaluru were arrested by the Hyderabad city police on Friday. Police recovered Rs 24 lakh and other documents from the accused.
One of the arrested persons, 35-year-old Abhimanyu Kumar Singh from Bihar’s Saran district, had two aliases – Dinesh Kumar Singh and Arnav Kumar Singh. The other accused Suryanarayana Jha, a medical representative from Bihar’s Darbhanga district, had an alias – Deepak. Two co-conspirators, Kamran Hussain and Asgar Sayeed, who also hail from Bihar, are absconding.
Police say Abhimanyu Kumar Singh and Hussain had been friends for the past three years and first met in Patna. Both individuals had financial problems and plotted together to cheat people on the pretext of providing medical seats at colleges in Bengaluru.
“They fraudulently collected data of students who qualified for NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) and called them on phone informing they would arrange seats in medical colleges on a commission basis. Falling for their sweet talk, people approached them for arranging seats. They collected a huge amount of money but failed to keep their promise,” City Police Commissioner Anjani Kumar said at a press conference on Friday.
The accused set up a job consultancy firm in Somajiguda called Sky Bridge Infotech Consultants with fake names and fake identity documents in April 2017 for executing their scam. The accused sourced the phone numbers of the students and convinced them over phone calls to pay the money for the medical seats. The suspects had also opened another fake consultancy in Bhopal and had cheated people to the tune of Rs 40 lakh.
“A preliminary probe revealed that they have collected Rs 48 lakh from 18 people until now and then absconded. When the victims approached the management of the medical colleges in Bengaluru, they realised they were cheated,” said the Commissioner.
After realising they had been conned, the victims, mostly NEET students, lodged two complaints at Punjagutta police station.
The West Zone police nabbed the two accused and handed them over to the Punjagutta police. Efforts are on to nab the two absconding suspects.