The Delhi Police has busted a gang of inter-state cheats who allegedly cheated dance troupes by posing as film directors and producers. The three accused cheated people in different states by checking in at high-end hotels, conducting fake recruitment interviews of dancers and then fleeing from the scene with valuables of the aspirants. The group did not even pay the hotel bills.

The accused, identified as Madan Sharma, Dinesh Arora and Naushad, have repeated the same modus-operandi in Jalandhar, Panipat, Jaipur, Gwalior, Agra, Noida and several times in the Capital.

The accused were traced when they used a stolen SIM card to book another hotel in Pitampura and were on their way to another commit another fraud. But the police caught up with the accused at the spot earlier this week.

The police began investigating the case when a general manager of Hotel Corus in the city, filed a complaint that a group of people posing as Bollywood directors and producers stayed in the hotel and fled without paying the bills.

“They had told the hotel staff that Raj Babar, Anupam Kher and Mika Singh will visit them in the hotel and they shall invite a dance troupe for auditions. But when the dancers came, the fraudsters asked them to keep their valuables and later fled with all that,” said deputy commissioner of police SBS Tyagi.

After the accused were arrested from Pitampura, CCTV footages at Hotel Corus confirmed that the same group had come to the hotel as well.

Police recovered five laptops, 40 mobile phones, 13 SIM cards, keys of the 11 hotels, 10 PAN cards, 10 voter ID cards, 11 driving licences, seven Aadhar cards and 22 debit cards from the accused. “They are involved in 11 cases of cheating and we expect more complaints,” Tyagi added.