Four people, including a former sales manager of an insurance company, were arrested in the Devbhoomi Dwarka district of Gujarat on Thursday for allegedly approving life insurance policies on deceased persons to gain lumpsum claims from the company. According to the police, the racket was unearthed after an official of Reliance Nippon Life Insurance in Mumbai on Tuesday submitted a complaint at Jam Khambhalia police station in Devbhoomi Dwarka complaining about a life insurance policy taken for a Jamnagar resident Nathubha Odedara in 2015. According to the complaint, Odedara's son Meraman Odedara said in 2018 that his father had died of a heart attack and tried to claim the insurance amount. However, a pre-claim investigation carried out by a third-party agency hired by the insurance company revealed that Nathubha had died in 2006, much before the policy was taken in 2015, and was a resident of Porbandar, not Jamnagar as mentioned in the policy. "The insurance policy on Odedara was created by his son in connivance with the then Reliance Nippon sales manager Arjanbhai Ambalia to cheat the company for their own personal gain," said a representative of Reliance Nippon Life Insurance in their police complaint. According to the police, four of the accused - sales manager Arjanbhai Ambalia, Nathubha's son Meraman Odedara, and insurance agents Umesh Sachaniya and Mashri Bhochiya - have been booked and arrested by the Special Operations Group (SOG) under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 420 for fraud, 406 for criminal breach of trust, and 465, 467, 468, 471 for forgery-related charges. "The accused agents and sales manager used to select profiles of deceased people and then connect with their family members to create fake insurance policies. Many more cases of such fraud committed by this gang have also come out," said a senior police official at Devbhoomi Dwarka.
