Mangalore: Spurious Gold Racket Busted - One Arrested

Pics: Dayanand Kukkaje
Daijiworld Media Network - Mangalore (SP)

Mangalore, Jul 21: A racket of fraudsters has been found to be involved with cheating gullible persons by making them believe that they have caught hold of some buried treasure and offering to sell the gold so found, at reasonable rates. A person, who was trying to deceive people by narrating this story and then inducing them to purchase spurious gold from him, was nabbed by police on Sunday July 20. About 1.5 kilograms of spurious gold was also recovered from him.

The arrested person has been identified as Hemant (22), from Voddaragere in Hoovina Hadagali taluk of Bellary district. The arrest was made near Padil Junction in the city on Sunday afternoon.

Harish Rao, a resident of Padil, had informed the Mangalore rural police that he had grown suspicious of an unidentified person who was moving about in the Padil neighbourhood, since about a month. The person used to visit houses of rich persons there, saying that he had stumbled upon a hidden treasure of gold coins while ploughing his fields and that he is ready to sell the same to them. He had asked them to call him if ever they were interested in buying gold coins.

The police drew up a plan to nab the person. Accordingly, they arranged to approach the man, with an offer to buy gold coins worth Rs 15 lac. The person was asked to bring the gold coins to the city. When he arrived in a KSRTC bus and was trying to sell the coins near Padil Junction, he was arrested with help from local people. Accused Hemant was found to be carrying spurious gold weighing about 1,500 gms. The coins were made through the process of gold plating of copper coins.  The policemen have estimated that the value of the gold coins seized, if it was of pure gold, would have been about Rs 15 lac.

The arrested person was produced in a court where he was remanded to 14 days of judicial custody. The policemen said that fraudsters like Hemant normally do not approach rich persons directly. At first, they befriend housemaids or somebody working for the rich persons and then succeed in convincing the rich persons through them, to buy gold at reasonable rates. Their targets are either ultra-rich persons or contractors, they said.