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NEW DELHI: Eight persons - including five girls - were recently arrested for allegedly running a fake education loan racket in northwest Delhi. The gang, operating under fictitious companies, duped more than 500 students of at least Rs 1.2 crore in the past one year, said police.

Acting on a tip-off, police nabbed the gang members on Thursday from their office in Parmanand Colony near Dr Mukherjee Nagar. The gang is headed by Varun Sardana (24), a former employee of an MNC. Varun had roped in his school friends and neighbours, Himanshu Sharma (21) and Sunny Pal (22) respectively, to help him dupe students. The girls handled the calls from prospective clients and maintained registers for each client, said police.

The gang trapped unsuspecting victims by advertising extensively in local Hindi dailies in NCR offering easy education loans at low interest rates.

''When the victims responded, the girls gang would convince them to deposit a processing fee of Rs 2500-3000 in bank accounts. Once a victim deposited the fee, the gang would then ask him to scan and mail relevant certificates to a given email ID. Thereafter, the victim was further fleeced on the ground that there were deficiencies in the certificates.

"Finally, the victim would be asked to deposit the first installment of the interest on the 'education loan' in a given bank account before the promised loan could be disbursed. All this was done without the victim going to the office of the racketeers or meeting any of the gang members,'' said additional commissioner of police (crime) Neeraj Thakur.

During the entire process the victims would suddenly find that the mobile contact number would go out of service. In some cases when the victims demanded personal audience with one of the executives of the finance company, Varun or Himanshu would meet the victims outside any college on north campus and convince them that everything was going on fine with their smooth talk.

The gang kept changing its office from one place to another every couple of months, said police. Twenty-six cellphones, about 60 unused SIM cards and 18 ATM cards were seized from them. Sixteen accounts of multinational banks registered under fake IDs were also found.

The gang operated under 13 fictitious names. A case of cheating by impersonating as someone else, cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property, forgery for purpose of cheating, using as genuine a forged document or electronic record and criminal conspiracy has been registered at the Crime Branch police station.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Fake-education-loan-racket-busted-8-held/articleshow/6849987.cms