16 July,2016 06:33 AM IST | | Chaitraly Deshmukh
A local pani puri vendor turned out to be a criminal mastermind who duped people of Rs 1.7 crore with a fake online scheme he started with his friend
Ramprakash Gupta with his fiancee
Pune: A local pani puri vendor turned out to be a criminal mastermind who duped people of Rs 1.7 crore with a fake online scheme he started with his friend.
Ramprakash Gupta with his fiancee
After duping around 70 over the past year, the duo was finally arrested by the Cyber cell in the last week of June.
Both men hail from Ujjain and had moved to Pune in search of work in 2014. While 33-year-old Ramprakash Gupta started a pani puri business, his friend Dhananjay Sharma (25) worked for a MNC, but later hatched the idea of setting up a fake business to con people.
Simple modus operandi
The duo would call people or organise seminars and lure them with a lucrative and easy job that can be done from home. The work was merely to click on ads on a particular website - they would each get user IDs and passwords and it took barely 15 minutes to do the work. But to get the job, the victims first had to invest anywhere between Rs 6,000 - 1 lakh, and they were promised monthly returns at 24% interest.
For some months, the accused were as good as their word - to earn the trust of their victims, they returned the money as promised. But about 10 months later, the money suddenly stopped coming in, and even phone calls went unanswered.
Most of their victims were city-based and the duo floated two different companies - MTSI Advertising Private Limited and Shopping Sense Marketing - at separate points of time in Ujjain for the people to click on ads online. This way, the crooks cheated 70 people and collected Rs 1.7 crore from June 2015 to May 2016. Gupta used his share to splurge Rs 50 lakh on his engagement ceremony held in Madhya Pradesh in May, and spent R1 lakh just on his outfit.
However, they ran out of luck when one of their victims, a 31-year-old resident of Shukrawar Peth, Vishal Jadhav filed a complaint in December last year. He had invested R10,000 at first in June last year and got good returns. Encouraged, he invested another Rs 50,000, which he never got back. The duo was arrested from Madhya Pradesh and are currently lodged in Yerwada Central Jail.
