Courier boy held for siphoning off Rs 92.95L

Kolkata: A courier delivery boy has been arrested by the Anti-Fraud Section of Kolkata Police on Wednesday for allegedly cheating and siphoning of money worth Rs 92.95 lakh.

He was produced before the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate in Bankshall Court and was remanded to police custody till August 16.

According to the police, the accused youth, identified as Subhankar Das of Chanditala in Hooghly, worked as a delivery boy of a courier company. The courier company is attached to several e-commerce sites and used to deliver products to customers who bought products from those e-commerce sites.

According to the system, customers who pay using Cash On Delivery (COD) method give money to the delivery boy, who is supposed to deposit the money to the cash deposit machine of the bank where company's account is being operated. Following that the delivery boy needs to submit the automatically generated receipt to his office where details along with last four digits of the account number gets printed.

Coincidentally, Das salary account number was almost similar to the company's account number where middle two of the last four digits were the same.

Taking advantage of this, Das used to deposit the money to his account and following that he used to tamper the receipt where only two numbers in the middle was clearly visible.

As at the time of submission of the receipt, receiving person usually checked it casually and filed the same, Das's fraudulent acts remained unnoticed. Later, he used to transfer the money to some other bank accounts.

In May, when financial audit was conducted at the end of 2018-19 financial year, auditors found more than 90 lakh rupees has no impression in the account.

After the company conducted a preliminary inquiry, security manager at eastern region of the courier company identified as Ranjit Deb lodged a complaint against unknown persons at the Girish Park police station.

After preliminary investigation, the case was taken up by the Anti-Fraud Section.

During the probe, police gathered all bank account details, which are related to the company and scrutinised them.

During the scrutiny, investigating officials saw the receipts, which was processed by Das, were tampered. Following which the cops asked the concern bank to provide Das's account details.

After police got the details, they found that since January 2018 Das has been involved in fraudulent activities till June 2019.

When police asked about Das, they found he had resigned from the company in May 2019. Later, police started gathering information about Das but the company had his old address where he did not live at present. Das's mobile phone was also switched off. The police took technical help and help of manual sources to track him down. On Wednesday, he was arrested from his Chanditala's rented flat.

Sources informed that it is suspected that he had invested the money somewhere as during checking of his bank account, little money was found. However, Das is being interrogated to find out where the money had gone.