Staff Reporter
ITANAGAR, 3 Mar: In a multi-crore Ponzi scam – a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors – one Braj Kishore Chaudhary alias Santosh Kumar, who is said to be the kingpin of the scam, was arrested by the Itanagar Capital Region (ICR) police on 23 February from Patna (Bihar), with the help of the Bihar Police.
A case (u/s 417/418/420/34 IPC) has been registered at the Banderdewa police station, and one more case has been registered at the Nirjuli police station in this regard.
Addressing the media on Thursday morning at the press club here, ICR SP Jimmy Chiram informed that, the arrest was made based on an FIR lodged by one Ha Tako on 17 April, 2021 at the Banderdewa police station, stating that he (Tako) was lured into investing money in the share market through a Karnataka-based company named Algoacademy in 2020 by one Raju Dutta in Guwahati (Assam), with a return offer of 1 percent per day on the investment.
“The complainant received the returned amount initially, as promised. However, in the later stage, the persons named BK Sharma, Santosh Singh and others who were part of the team, started avoiding him,” the SP informed.
By that time, the complainant, along with other investors, had already invested Rs 17 crores through the members who were ‘downline’.
The scheme ran from July 2020 to April 2021.
Investigation revealed that kingpin Braj Kishore Chaudhary, Raju Dutta, Bipin Kumar and Deepak Kar alias BK Sharma conspired to cheat the public of Arunachal in the name of providing inordinate returns on their investments.
Around 6,000 persons from the state had invested and got cheated. The accused persons returned around Rs 9 crores to the investors. However, an amount to the tune of Rs 8 crores was siphoned off.
Accused Santosh Kumar, Joydeep Dutta and Nitish Murthy were primarily chargesheeted on 16 November, 2021, and a supplementary chargesheet will be filed in due time against accused Braj Kishore Chaudhary.
Accused Joydeep Dutta was arrested on 5 July, 2021, and Nitish Murthy, the ‘director’ of the company, was arrested on 22 September, 2021 from Bangalore.
The SP urged the people to “avoid such schemes which offer inordinate returns, as it may take them to definite loss.”
He hailed the police team for solving the complex case, and extended gratitude to Nabam Sarvang for his technical support during the course of the investigation.
