Police nab five for duping banks above Rs 90 lakh using IDs of celebrities

Five accused have been arrested for forging the government IDs of 95 celebrities and eminent citizens to dupe banks of over Rs 90 lakh, said Delhi Police on Friday. “Arrested accused forged government IDs of 95 celebrities.
The loophole is in the documentation and backend verification which needs to be upgraded. All accused have good IT knowledge,” said Chhayya Sharma, Joint CP, Eastern Range. The police said the accused have been identified as Puneet, Md Asif, Sunil Kumar, Vishwa Bhaskar Sharma, and Pankaj Mishra.
Explaining the modus operandi, the police said, “A complaint was lodged by Prem Shekhawat, authorised representative of FPL Technologies Private Limited, a Pune-based company having One Card project. This company provides contactless metal credit cards and virtual cards.”
“A case was registered wherein it was alleged that a few people have cheated their company to the tune of Rs. 21,32,572.85 by creating fake Pan Card and Aadhaar cards of celebrities like Sachin Tendulkar, Alia Bhatt, Abhishek Bachchan, Himesh Reshamiya and getting credit card issued from their company,” the police added. During the investigation, it was revealed that the accused got GST details of these celebrities from Google. The first two digits of GSTIN are the state code and the next 10 digits are the PAN number, said the police.
The date of birth of these celebrities is easily available on Google thus the accused got two important PAN details, like PAN and date of birth.
“Similarly, they followed the same process to forge the Aadhaar details. And after getting new PAN and Aaddhar, the fraudsters applied for new credit cards from Pune-based fintech startup ‘One Card’”, said the police.