NEW DELHI: A trader whose shop was sealed during a corporation sealing drive posed as an insurance agent and duped government officers.Pankaj Gupta and two others called up an IPS officer from West Bengal, posing as LIC agents. They asked him to transfer some money into an account in Mumbai to receive a bonus. Eventually, they received Rs 22 lakh and disappeared after that. The men were tracked down by the Crime Branch and caught from west Delhi.The other two men were identified as Gurnam Singh and Vipin Kumar Luthra. They used different identities to call their victims and were helped by one Narender Saini and a woman in this.DCP (crime) G Ram Gopal Naik said the crime branch received a complaint from Ranabir Mukherjee, retired deputy SP of West Bengal Police , after which a team was formed to track down the numbers from which e-calls were being made. “We reached them at their hideout and arrested them after this. A case of cheating has been registered against them,” said DCP Naik.Gupta told the police that a bank account in the name of ‘Standard Services’ was being used to receive the money. But no such company was found at the address mentioned. A further probe revealed that it was registered with one Amarjeet Singh, which later turned out to be Gurnam who used a fake ID as address proof to open the account. The gang was also using eight other accounts opened using fake IDs.Gurnam Singh and Luthra were arrested based on the disclosures of Gupta. They told the police that Gupta had lured them into the fraud by saying that Saini and the woman named Pooja were cheating people on the pretext of LIC loyalty bonus and in lieu of that they were giving them 10% of the cheated amount to the account holder. Gupta kept 30% of the money while the other two got smaller amounts.Gupta said that after his shop was closed, he took up a job in Noida where he met Saini and Pooja who used to work at a call centre. Gupta used fake IDs to open bank accounts and later changed his name to call the victims as well. Cops found two other companies with which he had opened bank accounts as well.

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