By IANS
Lucknow : The Special Task Force (STF) of the Uttar Pradesh police Friday busted a fake visa racket and arrested three people for duping hundreds of people, a top police official said here.
Additional Director General of Police (STF) Brij Lal told reporters here that 59 passports were seized and several bank accounts with hundreds of thousands of rupees in them were detected during the raid in Aliganj locality here.
“All this money was collected by Osama, Mohammad Shibu and Mohammad Rizwan from job aspirants who were lured on false promises of facilitating visas,” Lal said.
“A large number of original visa applications were recovered together with signed blank cheques, fake driving licences and as many as 139 photographs from them,” he said.
Osama, the kingpin of the racket, is also alleged to have obtained loans from various banks in the names of fictitious people against forged documents.
The police official said the fraudsters revealed their modus operation under sustained interrogation. The three would entice visa applicants outside the embassies, particularly of the Gulf nations.
“Osama had become adept in the art of posing as a visa agent and would build so much confidence among his victims that they would even give him their original passports, which more often than not were used for forgery,” Lal said.
“In some cases the passports were returned to the legitimate holders from fake addresses so that the tricksters continued to remain at large until they eventually fell into our trap,” he added.