A 25-year-old man, associated as a delivery person with a private company, which is into delivering products booked through various online shopping apps, has been arrested on Friday by the Tardeo police for allegedly committing theft of goods which were meant to be delivered to the customers.
The accused allegedly used to generate bogus orders of the products and at the time of delivery, he would replace the genuine products with fake ones and then return it back to the company as undelivered.
He has allegedly pocketed the products worth Rs 58,000, police said.
The arrested suspect has been identified as Saif Ali Mohammad Shah, a resident of Kamathipura in Nagpada.
According to the police, the complainant in the case is a security officer in the company, which is in the business of delivering online booked products. The said company's office is situated at Sane Guruji Marg at Tardeo. The company delivers products ordered online in the Tardeo area.
On June 4, the officials at the Tardeo office had received an email from the company's central processing office at Lower Parel, informing them that a package containing a watch of a reputed company that was returned from the Tardeo office to the Lower Parel office was being inspected which revealed that the package contained a fake watch.
A probe carried out by the company revealed that Shah was the delivery person for the said package.
"When the complainant made enquiries with Shah about the said package, he claimed that he had lost the watch in the package and was ready to pay for the loss. On June 16, another email was received from the Lower Parel office informing them that there were differences in the three products which were given to Shah for delivery and were returned. Further probe revealed that the information about the customers mentioned in the said orders were wrong. It was learnt that Shah would book orders online in the name of bogus customers and on the pretext of delivering the products, he would tamper with the packaging, take out the original product and replace them with fake ones," said a police officer.
The company then decided to lodge a police complaint against Shah.
As per the complaint, between May 28 and May 30, Shah had misappropriated the products worth Rs 58,480 and cheated the company.
During the questioning by the police, Shah claimed that he had committed the fraud along with his associate Ashfaq and that he had given the misappropriated products to Ashfaq.
