Kundapur: Sellers of Spurious Ornaments Caught by Alert Shopkeeper

Vinay Pais
Daijiworld Media Network – Kundapur (SP)

Kundapur, Feb 3: Presence of mind displayed by a shop owner here saved him of the embarrassment and loss of money from peddlers of spurious gold ornaments. He could also nab the fraudsters, who had come to sell a huge necklace purported to be made of gold and claimed to be belonging to the era of kings and emperors. The thieves are now cooling their heels in jail.

A week back, two men and a woman had approached New Children’s Dress Centre located opposite government hospital here.  Initially, they pretended to be interested in buying garments, and showed some silver coins to the shop owner, Stany Olivera, and claimed that they had found them while digging up their backyard. They offered to sell these coins to him, duly asking him to verify the genuineness of the coins if he so desired. They handed over one of the coins to Olivera before going away, promising to come back the next day.

Stany grew doubtful about the persons, and got the coins tested. He found them to be genuine. The fraudsters approached him two days later, and sought payment of Rs 500 for the silver coin. When Stany acted as if he was interested in buying the coin, and requested them to lower the price, they said they had in their possession a huge, ancient golden necklace belonging to the bygone era, which they said, was worth several lacs of rupees. They offered to sell it to Stany.

They came back the next day, and showed to him a huge necklace which resembled the one worn by people donning mythological characters. They pulled out two golden beads from the necklace and asked Stany to get them checked, if he had doubt. They asked Stany to keep ready Rs 6.5 lac in cash the next day.

Stany found that both the beads were in fact, made of gold. He however, had grown doubtful about the plans of the fraudsters. He kept bundles of currency notes in a place which was visible to the prospective sellers of gold ornaments when they came to his shop the next day, and started bargaining to lower the price of the ornament to around two lac rupees.

As soon as the fraudsters took out the necklace in question, those in the shop noticed that there was some difference in the beads handed over the earlier day and the ones in the necklace. As planned previously, Wilson D’Souza, Novel Olivera and Johnson Almeida pounced upon the fraudsters and handed them over to the local police station. However in the melee, their women companion slipped out of the shop and disappeared. Reportedly, the fraudsters are of north Indian origin.

When the press persons rushed to the police station after getting this information and were getting information about the operation from the policemen, circle inspector, Uday Gaonkar, got angry and asked them not to click the photographs of the culprits. He also warned the policemen that investigations might suffer, if they give information to the media persons in advance.

The people on the spot wondered about this attitude, and were heard commenting that the local policemen, who had failed to nab murderers and thieves in several recent cases, had got angry when the people themselves nabbed the culprits and handed them over to them.