Puducherry scam case: CID recovers 2 new SUVs from city

Kolkata: In a major development in the investigation of the fraud case lodged at Puducherry in which the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had arrested a person on Saturday, the state investigating agency on Monday recovered two new SUVs from the city.

"The two vehicles were brought to the city to carry cheated money. They have not been registered yet," a senior CID official said.

It may be mentioned that CID had arrested one Shyam Maitra from near a five-star hotel on EM Bypass on Saturday. He had posed as the AGM of SAIL on a marketing business web portal and used to ask customers to buy its products and send money to his account through RTGS.

In the course of investigation, the CID sleuths have found that Maitra had impersonated Bholanath Biswas, AGM Marketing of SAIL.

A complaint was lodged with the Puducherry police in this regard and following it, they called up Additional Director General (ADG) CID, seeking assistance in this regard as they learnt through their source network that Maitra had taken shelter in Kolkata.

It has been learnt that M/S Pasupati Engineering of Puducherry had placed an order for 35 MT of steel, but the accused had informed them that SAIL does not supply less than 100 MT of steel. Eventually, the victim had made a payment of Rs 58,32,000 through RTGS. The case was registered in Puducherry on July 26. The complaint was lodged by Prashant Banshal, the owner of the company.

The arrested person is a resident of Sukantapalli in Durgapur. He had been in the business of duping people by various means since 2014.

Preliminary investigation has revealed that he had cheated a number of people to the tune of a few crores.