On Sunday (17th March), the Police officials in Odisha stated that they arrested two brothers in Dhenkenal district for allegedly posing as Enforcement Directorate officers, and extorting money from government officials. They have been arrested based on a complaint lodged by Chhatrapur sub-collector Debadatta Mohanta.
The Police added that the two accused identified as Tarinisen Mohapatra (30) and Brahmashankar Mohapatra (27) were arrested by the Special Task Force (STF) of the state police from their home in Dhenkanal town on Saturday (16th March).
According to reports, the accused duo, posing as ED officers, used to take payments through PhonePe and GPay to clear government officers from “charges” levied against them. For this purpose, they used to issue fake “clearance letters” to the officers.
The officials stated that the brothers borrowed a huge amount of money and were not able to repay the lenders following which they hatched a plan to cheat government employees.
According to reports, they posed as “Additional Director of ED Bhubaneswar” and contacted about 300 officers of different government departments of the state over the phone. The accused duo succeeded in extorting money from some of the officers.
“They succeeded in extorting money from some of the officers, and in total payments of more than Rs 16 lakh have been traced. They used to take payments through PhonePe and GPay, and issued fake ‘clearance letters’ to the officers, clearing them of all ‘charges’,” the official said.
An STF officer said that the accused duo was arrested on the basis of a complaint lodged by Chhatrapur sub-collector Debadatta Mohanta. He added that a laptop, a desktop, five mobile phones, bank passbooks and chequebooks, fake ID cards, and 17 ATM cards were seized from them. Further investigation into the case is underway.
Earlier in February this year, a similar case came to light from Tamil Nadu where five people were arrested for impersonating ED officials, conducting a fake raid at a businessman’s office, and looting Rs 1.69 crore. The culprits had also taken away
two luxury cars and a couple of costly mobile phones with them in the fake raids. The accused were identified as Vijay Karthick (37), Narendra Nath (45), Rajasekar (39), Loganathan (41), Gopinath (46).
They were arrested based on the complaint filed by a person named Anguraj and his partner Durai in Tiruppur.