Bengaluru Police Bust Gang Cheating Businessmen With Fake 'Currency Shower’

Bengaluru: Bengaluru police have busted a 10-member gang, who used to promise businessmen by offering to get a shower of currency notes and cheated them of lakhs of rupees.

Interestingly, the RBI got suspicious about the ₹2000 currency notes that had come for deposit and informed the Halasuru Gate police, resulting in arrest of the gang members and recovering ₹18 lakh from them.

The fake swamis include Satyananda Swamy alias Basavaraj, Mallikarjuna, Mohan alias Muniswamy were kingpins of the gang. The three used to lure the businessmen through their henchmen, who boasted about the swami's divine power of invoking currency notes rain on particular days. For that, they sought SH series ₹2000 currency notes released by RBI in 2018. The henchmen also used to tell their gullible victims, where these currency notes were available.

They would give a particular date for their victims, when they had to come alone with the money and auspicious material for the rituals. The rituals would be on the bank of a river or a pond. Once the ritual started, the victims were asked to take three dips in the river or pond and cut lemon before every dip. By the time their victim returned, the gang would escape with the money.

Things went wrong when two of the gang members went to deposit the money with RBI, as other banks would not accept the ₹2000 currency notes. The RBI noticed that the serial numbers of at least 70 currency notes of ₹2000 were tampered. They lodged a complaint with Halasur Gate police, giving details of the account numbers.

The police suspect that the gang had cheated more people outside Bengaluru also and few cases had taken place in neighboring Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Since the businessmen went voluntarily due to their greed, they had neither shared the incident with anyone, nor lodged a complaint with the police.

Now, the police are tracing the victims of `currency shower' gang.