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NEW DELHI: The owner of a mobile phone shop and his associate, a jobless insurance agent, have been arrested for allegedly collecting Aadhaar card details from customers and using them to get SIM cards for duping people with the promise of bonuses on insurance schemes.

DCP (central) Mandeep Singh Randhawa said a probe was initiated under ACP Geetanjali Khandelwal after a victim filed a complaint in Chandni Mahal saying a person called and told him that he had accrued Rs 68,000 as bonus in an insurance scheme and it would be deposited in his account if he agreed to pay Rs 28,000 to the company as security fees.

“The complainant sensed something suspicious and approached us. While tracking the number from which the call was made, we found that it was issued against a fake ID. We also found the account in which they asked to deposit the money was registered against a travel agency,” said DCP Randhawa.

The owner of the agency, Ravi Adhikari, was tracked down using the address proof attached to the account number. During questioning, Adhikari led cops to Manish Bansal and Hemant.

Police said Bansal, who owned the shop in Shastri Nagar, would issue fake numbers from which the calls were made to the respective targets.

Bansal told police that while registering the Aadhaar cards, he would make copies of it. He would make customers feed in details twice claiming technical problem. However, this time, he would link the Aadhaar card to another number and get it activated. This number would later be used to make calls to targets.

Adhikari told police that he put his experience in the insurance agency to get personal details and account numbers of customers from the database of the insurance company. Bansal would sell the SIM cards to Hemant for Rs 200, which would later be used by Adhikari to make calls.

Hemant and Adhikari claimed that they had opened a travel agency in Devli earlier this year, but the agency ran into losses, following which they decided to cheat people. They came in contact with Bansal, who promised to get them the SIM cards. The accused even told police that they used to employ 15-20 people in the company who were paid to make the calls.

