Journalism of Courage
Three people have been arrested for allegedly duping a telecom firm to the tune of Rs 1.6 crore by procuring 18,359 mobile dongles and 6,342 mobile connections in the name of a bogus IT company, police said.
The three posed as senior officials of the IT company and hatched a conspiracy in connivance with employees of a distributor associated with the telecom firm. A chargesheet in the case has been filed before a Delhi court.
Police said the three accused have been identified as Deepak Sahu, Sunil Kumar and Gagan Satija, who worked with the distributor. Police said that on February 22, telecom firm employee Sarvesh Kumar lodged an FIR with the Cyber Cell, alleging that one Shintu Kumar had approached a distributor to procure data cards and SIM cards for his company.
“Shintu submitted documents and was provided 6,342 mobile connections and 7,983 dongles. On September 20, 2017, Shintu’s company organised a conference at a five-star hotel where they announced a project in Rajasthan. For this, they sought 10,000 mobile dongles and SIM cards within 300 days. A woman posing as the vice-president of the company sent the requirements over email,” police stated in the chargesheet.
The complainant alleged that since January this year, the telecom firm started noticing irregularities in bill payments and requested officials of the IT company to arrange a meeting, but they started avoiding them. “Sarvesh came to know about the fraud after a visit to their office in Gurgaon showed that it was empty. The telecom firm suffered a financial loss of Rs 1.6 crore,” police said.
Police arrested Deepak from Gurgaon on August 4. “He told police he used to work as a customer relationship officer with a telecom company in Gurgaon and he met Gagan during work,” an officer said.
“After procuring the cards, they sold them to customers and said they don’t have to pay the bill. When the bills started mounting, they closed their office and fled,” the officer said.
