Mumbai: The Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) police are on the lookout for unidentified accused persons who cheated a reputed private bank, Standard Chartered, by misappropriating funds worth Rs 85 lakhs. This fraud was going on for over a year and came to light only when the bank was summing up balance sheet for the financial year 2018-19.
The unidentified accused persons have been booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code for fraud, cheating, forgery and common intention. From February 23, 2018 till March 20 this year, the Standard Chartered’s BKC branch had issued several demand drafts (DD) payments in the names of private small-scale accounts.
When the bank officials were tallying the year’s expenses and revenue, they realised a huge amount sent through the DD payments were missing. After an internal investigation was conducted, the bank officials learnt over 1,231 DDs issued between February 23 2018 and March 2019 were misappropriated.
A further investigation revealed the DDs, which were sent by a courier service, Overnight Courier Limited, never reached their destined small savings group accounts. The manager of Standard Chartered bank’s BKC branch, Shirish Kumar Goyal, approached BKC police on March 20 and registered a complaint against unknown persons.
Kalpana Gadekar, a senior police inspector of BKC police station, said, “The unknown accused had misappropriated 1,231 DDs worth Rs 85 lakhs, endorsed them in a private bank and withdrew the money in small amounts to avert suspicion. We are tracking all the DDs issued since February 2018 and suspect an employee of the bank or the courier service to be involved in the case.”
BKC Police have booked unknown accused persons under relevant sections of the IPC for criminal breach of trust by a public servant, banker (Section 409), forgery (Section 465), forgery of valuable security (Section 467), using electronic forged document (Section 471), cheating (Section 420), criminal conspiracy (Section 120B) and common intention (Section 34). Till now no arrests have been made in the case.
