Northeast archer duped by easy loans

Fly-by-night operators target northeast

Ayaskant Das | New Delhi | 21 September 2009 |

Non-existent companies duping the gullible in small towns, is a regular occurrence. In the northeast such companies are openly advertising in major English and local dailies with unreal claims only to net the unsuspecting.

John Frankie Rymbai is a national-level archer from Shillong in Meghalaya. This 26-year-old archer has been caught with the wrong arrow in his bow after being duped by a financial company. He has been running around in circles in New Delhi for the last eight months in search of the company that claimed to have had its headquarters in the national capital region. Far from pursuing a career in the footsteps of his close friends and national champions Limba Ram (an Olympian archer) and Mangal Singh, John has been spending sleepless nights and restless days in his hunt for the “fraudsters” who duped him. His target remains elusive but John is not willing to give up. After all he is not the only person who has been duped by such fly-by-night financial loan companies: His fight is also for the many people duped by such operators back home in Meghalaya.

Cut back to October 2008. John came across an advertisement for easy loans [offered with an interest rate of four per cent per annum which is well below the guidelines prescribed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)]. The advertisement was on behalf of a financial company named Suvidha Associates and appeared in a leading English newspaper in Meghalaya. The company claimed to have its head office in Faridabad in the national capital region of Delhi. Suvidha claimed to be an agency of Bharti Financial Corporation (BFC), which in turn, in its letterhead, claimed to be a unit of the well-known Bharti Group.

Lured by the ad, John got in touch with the financial company for a loan. But instead he found himself being drawn into the business by the representatives of the company. The company asked John to arrange for rented accommodation for their office in Shillong and also promised him to pay a certain percentage of the total amount of loan amount disbursed, as commission, if he helped them find clients. John, subsequently, leased out his own premises to BFC to operate from Shillong. BFC presented him with papers that showed them to be accredited as Reserve Bank of India licence holders. These papers, he later discovered, were fake. As per the forged RBI document, one Amar Mittal was the owner of BFC.

More than 500 people in Meghalaya, including John, were selected by the company to be awarded loans. On December 21, 2008, three people on behalf of Suvidha Associates’ headquarters in Faridabad landed up in Shillong: Anil Sharma, who claimed to be the assistant manager of Suvidha Associates; Amar Singh and Kunal Kapoor, who claimed to be its legal team. Sudesh Kumar, who claimed to be the Development Officer of BFC, was already in Shillong since December 15, 2009 and was the one who had set up office in the premises rented out by John. This team was in Shillong for inspection and interviews of the 550 people who had been ‘shortlisted’ for loans. The expense for conducting their business in Shillong including boarding, lodging and travel expenses, was picked up by John on condition that they would settle later. But that was never to be.

The legal team after inspection placed a proposal before the selected candidates that they would not have to furnish guarantors if they agreed to insure one per cent of applied loan amount with Bharti Axa. This money was paid to Sudesh Kumar who gave them receipts on behalf of BFC. A total of Rs 3.10 lakhs was transferred (by John of behalf of others) in two instalments in the name of Suresh Sharma in account number 008301518558 of ICICI bank’s branch Faridabad, in December 2008 from ICICI bank’s branch in Shillong.

John even celebrated Christmas with the alleged fraudsters at home. However, the next day they asked John to pay them a further Rs two lakhs on account of expenses incurred by the team (it is to be noted that the second instalment of the money was paid by John only on January 31, 2008). On December 26, 2008, Anil Sharma and Kunal Kapoor left for Delhi while Amar Singh and Sudesh Kumar stayed back. The same evening they telephoned Sudesh to send John and Amar to Delhi to sign some documents. The two left for Delhi the same evening. John was put up in a hotel in Faridabad but no one from Suvidha Associates visited him for the next two days. On December 29, 2008, Amar Singh called on John and took him to an office said to be of Suvidha Associates on Railway Road near NIT, Faridabad – a decrepit one-room set up. His cell phone and handy cam were not allowed inside. John was then handed a list of 12 people whose loans were finalised and were supposed to be disbursed on January 5, 2009. According to the same document that was provided by John to Current, he was also one of the candidates in the list.  Meanwhile, John also learnt that Sudesh had been collecting more money from people in Shillong. Sudesh managed to collect Rs 1,50,000 from one Priyanka Pal (name changed) on some fraudulent issue related to the disbursal of her loan. When John reached Shillong on December 30, 2008, Sudesh Kumar had already left town for Guwahati. He was however in constant touch with John and convinced him to deposit the remaining money towards with Bharti Axa. John deposited the rest of the amount the next day, that is, on December 31, 2008. That was the last John was to hear from any of the BFC members.

By the evening of January 5, 2009, all cell phones had been switched off. John was unable to reach any of them even after repeated attempts. When John visited Delhi again and reached the office of Suvidha Associates in Faridabad, it did not exist. Neither has he been able to get the contacts of any of the people who had visited Shillong to do business. Current also made several attempts to contact the telephone numbers on the company’s letterhead but none was working. His FIR lodged in Faridabad has brought no results. It has only brought untold misery on John. It was then that John decided to investigate the scam that he had unwittingly been a part of.

John has since surveyed many financial companies operating in different parts of the country. Fly-by-night financial operators claiming to be representatives of creditable finance companies and using forged RBI documents have duped money worth crores of rupees from people from several states in the northeast. These operators with names such as Empax Group, Ridhi Finance, Family Corporation and so on claim their head offices to be in Delhi and establish their agencies in small towns. They open accounts in nationalised and reputed private banks and deposit the money collected under various heads relating to the processing of loans in these accounts. Once they dupe people of sufficient amounts – under the pretext of login fees, processing fees or any fees carrying a similar head – they vanish from the towns as quickly as they had appeared. John has been forced to pay money back to people who had applied for loans and had paid the processing fee on John’s word. He has had to sell off property to do so.

John provided Current with the copy of a document that has been forged in the name of the central bank of the country, the RBI, as well as copies of letters of approval of loans on letterheads of many fraudulent financial companies. He also furnished several copies of counterfoils of payments made by loan applicants to the loan disbursers with accounts in different banks. Many of these counterfoils had been carried to Shillong from branches of banks in New Delhi.

But the banks have been unhelpful in providing John the details of the persons holding these accounts. Isn’t it the bank’s duty to verify whether these accounts were for real or benaami when a complaint of such nature is brought to them? Will the RBI take cognisance of the fact that frauds were being carried out in its name by using its forged letterhead and forged signatures? Will the police even care to curb the proliferation of these fly-by-night operators? Will newspapers be careful and check the veracity of companies offering loans at dirt-cheap interest rates before they carry their advertisements on their classified pages? Will the public take care in being alert from such fraudsters? Perhaps the answer lies in a concerted effort on the part of all involved. Perhaps a cohesive effort will only help avoid several people like John from falling into the clutches of such merciless sharks.