Mumbai Crime: 3 Booked For Cheating Army Man, 5 Others With Lure Of Cheap Cars

Mumbai: The Byculla police have registered a case against three persons for cheating five others, including a retired army man, by luring them with cars at low prices. The complainant army man, Suresh Vichare, 58, was allegedly introduced to the accused, Pankaj Kumar Thakur, by another ex-army man, Hemant Chavan.

Thakur introduced himself as a former worker of CSD canteen that sells products to defence personnel at subsidised prices, and said that he is acquainted with car agencies in Mumbai, Thane and Panvel. 

Nov 2021 incident

In November 2021, Thakur took an advance of Rs25,000 from Vichare and took another Rs1 lakh through NEFT for a Tata car. In December that year, he told Vichare that his car had arrived and would be available at a showroom. Vichare transferred Rs6.86 lakh to Thakur’s bank account but was told that the delivery would take another two days. 

The car, however, never arrived. In the meantime, Vichare found out that four of his colleagues had also been cheated of Rs 1.5 lakh each on the pretext of low car prices. One of them, Gurunath Sawanth, a Mumbai Port Trust employee, paid Rs15.32 lakh.

After an application in the court to register a case against Chavan, an FIR has been registered against Thakur and his associates Amit Kumar Yadav and Ramkumar Thakur.