How a hoax caller is keeping Ghaziabad Police on its toes

The next day, at 7pm, a man, identifying himself as Jeetu, calls 112. “He told us that someone has stolen money from a few people in Loni,’’ the police officer says. Again the quick response team is mobilised. Once the team reaches Loni, they don’t find anything. “Jeetu was missing and his number was switched off,’’ said police.

The Loni police receive another call at 4am on June 12. Identifying himself as Deepak Tyagi, the caller tells the police his wife has been shot dead in Panchsheel colony of Ghaziabad. When the police reach the spot, they realise that no such incident has happened. The police try to reach Tyagi’s number and find it switched off.

During the first 15 days of June, Ghaziabad Police says it received 83 calls that proved to be a hoax. The initial probe, Ghaziabad Police says, reveals that such “calls were made from the same number to different police stations of Kotwali, Nandgram, Kavinagar, Sahibabad, Tilamod and Loni”. Once the matter was probed further, the police say, they found out that such hoax calls were made from that particular phone number for three months. “Initially, such calls were sporadic and thus didn’t attract attention. After June 1, the frequency of the calls increased and we were alarmed,’’ a senior police officer says.

The Ghaziabad Police is now trying to find out whether these hoax calls were just pranks or made with criminal intent. “In any case, a lot of time of the police officials was wasted responding to these false and misleading reports,’’ the senior police officer says. “That’s a crime”.

Assistant Commissioner of Police, Ghaziabad, Suryabali Maurya told The Indian Express that the complaints in most of these hoax calls were regarding “domestic violence, theft, land dispute, beating and bruising”.

“Every time the caller identified themselves with a different name. The fake names that the caller used were both male and female such as Rahul, Monica, Sonia, Sameer and others,’’ ACP Maurya says. “When we finally checked the number, we found out that the number was the same for every such call”.

He said that a case has been registered against the caller under “IPC section 203 (giving false information) and 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public function)” at Loni Police station.

The investigation by the Loni Police Station, a senior police officer told The Indian Express, found that the number used for the repeated hoax calls is “registered in the name of Juhi Sharma, a resident of Loni in Ghaziabad”. “The maximum calls have been made at Loni Police station so a collective FIR was registered here,” the police officer says. “We don’t know anything about the caller other than this name. But we have received the Call Detail Record (CDR) of the caller and will nab them in a few days.”