The Shivaji Park police have arrested three people who tried to dupe the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) by claiming an insurance amount of Rs2 crore by furnishing a fake death certificate.
Nanda Taksale had taken a policy in her son Dinesh's name in April 2015. In March 2017, an application was filed claiming the insured sum of Rs2 crore, stating that Dinesh had died in a road accident in Pune in December 2016. However, LIC officials got suspicious as the claim was made within 18 months of the policy being issued. A verification confirmed that Dinesh was in fact alive and the death certificate is fake, said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Zone V) Manoj Patil.
The LIC lodged a police complaint in February and this was reported by The Free Press Journal on February 23.
According to Patil, Dinesh and his friends Anil Latke and Vijay Malvade had hatched a plan to make a policy claim by making someone else's demise pass off as Dinesh's death. “Dinesh had also inflated his income and sought a policy cover of Rs8 crore in 2015, but the LIC's Dadar branch issued a policy of Rs2 crore,” he said, adding that they were looking for an unclaimed body and got to know of an unidentified person who died in an accident on the Ahmednagar-Pune highway.
To claim the body, they sent another woman posing as Dinesh's mother. The body could not be identified due to the accident, but was released due to her claims and cremated, after which a death certificate was made in the name of Dinesh.
Dinesh then sent another woman to the LIC office posing as his mother to file a claim. When the LIC lodged a complaint, the police visited Dinesh's house in plain clothes and were told by his mother that he had gone to work.
“We have arrested three men for cheating, forgery and other relevant offences under the Indian Penal Code sections. We are trying to get information about the woman and more arrests are likely,” DCP Patil added. The police are now investigating the identity of the deceased.
