Surat: The investigation in a recently unfolded bank fraud case involving Rs 92 lakh has now led to a busting of a racket involved in the production and sale of counterfeit documents validating Indian identities. The city police’s economic offences cell has arrested two individuals, who were producing these documents for as little as Rs 15 to Rs 50.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that a minimum of two lakh fake documents, verifying Indian identities, were made at a very low cost. The culprits behind this operation, Somnath Pramod Kumar from Rajasthan and Premveer Singh Thakur from Uttar Pradesh were apprehended by the economic offences cell following extensive technical surveillance.

In the second week of August, HDFC Bank filed a complaint with the Umra police station against 20 individuals who had obtained loans totalling Rs 92 lakh using counterfeit salary slips and bank statements. Six arrests were made in connection with this case. During the interrogation of one of the arrested suspects, Prince, it was revealed that he had acquired fake certificates through the premsinghpanel.xyz portal for a mere Rs 15 to Rs 50 per document.

A team led by Inspector Sub-Inspector RD Desai apprehended Somnath, the mastermind behind the scheme, in Ganganagar, Rajasthan. Another team, led by Inspector NG Chaudhary, arrested Premveer Singh from Unnao, Uttar Pradesh. Police have identified Somnath as the mastermind of the racket. Earlier, the police had arrested Prince Prasad, Prithvisinh Rathod, Abusad Khan, Sufiyan Malek, Ramswaroop Lodhi, and Mukesh Chaudhary. They were involved in the creation of counterfeit election cards, Aadhar cards, PAN cards, driving licenses, voter ID cards, and other essential documents.

It is learnt that the accused had created a website with a homepage that bore a resemblance to a government website. They had paid two lakh rupees to acquire software that imitated documents such as Aadhaar cards, voter IDs, driving licenses, Ayushman cards, Bharat cards, and numerous others. The website was connected to the bank accounts of Axis Bank and SBI, with balances of 11,00,00 and 12,00,00, respectively, which are now frozen. DeshGujarat