Cheque forgery racket: PNB manager among 5 held, mastermind flees to US
A senior manager of the Punjab National Bank (PNB), along with four others, has been arrested for cloning cheques of account holders and withdrawing nearly Rs 95 lakh from one of the accounts. Police said they recovered as many as 81 cheques of different private and public sector banks from the possession of the accused.
The mastermind of the syndicate, Chirag Chaudhary, has fled the country and is currently in the United States (US), they added. Chaudhary runs a restro-bar, Walk-In Street, in Karol Bagh.
“Gaurav Kumar Goel, 34, Ashish Kumar Parashar alias Kishley Kishore alias Shanu, 28, Amarjeet Singh, 47, Sunil Sharma, 42, and PNB manager Pritam Das, 54, have been arrested. They operated from various parts of the country. Duplicate cheques of banks including PNB, SBI, HDFC, Bank of Baroda, Axis, Bank of India, ICICI, Canara, Indusind, Union, Yes, Karur Vysya, Allahabad, and IDBI banks have been recovered from them,” Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (south) Chinmoy Biswal said.
He further said the accused used sophisticated fonts and restricted ink to re-print the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) code and Indian Financial System Code (IFSC).
The racket was unearthed after an account holder approached the police in March, saying that Rs 9,500,000 …read more