Police recovered Rs 20 lakh which the con men had extorted from the family. The cops are probing the role the role of an insider or a distant relative who may have told the men about the cash in the house (Photo grab from video provided by RWA)

For six men, it was a near-perfect con plan that went horribly wrong.

Posing as income tax officials, the plan was to cheat a businessman’s family and flee with their cash and jewellery. On Sunday, in a vehicle bearing the Haryana government’s sticker, the six alleged con men knocked at the door of a south Delhi businessman.

With the air of importance that usually surrounds officers on government duty, the men first took away the cell phones of the businessman’s family members, warning them that the I-T team was there to investigate a charge of tax evasion worth over Rs 20 crore.

The men would have succeeded in their plan too had a family member of the businessman not found their behaviour suspicious and raised an alarm. A crowd of around 150 locals soon gathered outside the trader’s house and the fake I-T sleuths were nabbed, roughed up, interrogated, made to apologise and later handed over to the police.

The incident was reported from Malviya Nagar on Sunday around 9am. Family members told police that the six men had come in a Tata Safari car that had a Haryana government’s sticker fixed on the windscreen. CCTV footage recovered from the colony showed one of their associates in a Honda City car waiting outside the house.

At around 9.05am, the men, some of them carrying files, knocked at the door of Ramesh Chand, a Malviya Nagar-based businessmen dealing in electronic goods. The men then took away the mobile phones of the family members alleging that they had come on government duty to investigate a tax evasion charge of Rs 20 crores.

Eyewitness Sanjeev Rao, also RWA president, who was recently appointed a police mitra (civilians appointed to help the police) told HT, “I live next to their house. As I was stepping out, Chand’s daughter told me about some men whom they suspected were posing as I-T officials. I entered the house and saw those men. I asked them for their identity cards and they flashed a laminated identity card, which seemed fake,” said Rao.

The ID card, which police later seized, shows the accused Mitesh Kumar, was posing as an assistant commissioner with the central board of direct tax in the finance ministry.

At one place on Kumar’s identity card, the word neck was spelt as ‘nack’.

Rao told HT that he called I-T department to check if they were involved in any such raid. Rao said no I-T department officer confirmed the raid.

“By the time I was questioning them, a crowd of at least 100-150 residents had gathered outside the house. Some of them even entered the house and thrashed the men. We called the police, interrogated them and handed them over to the police.”

Chinmoy Biswal, additional deputy commissioner of police (south), confirmed that all the six men posed as fake income tax officers. The accused were identified as Mitesh Kumar, Naunhyal, Yogesh Kumar, Govind Sharma, Amit Aggarwal and Parvinder. Parvinder, police said, was posing as the driver of the group. A seventh accused, Gaurav, was waiting outside the house in a car and managed to flee.

DCP Biswal said that police recovered Rs 20 lakh in cash from the Tata Safari car that they had extorted from the family.

Police said they are probing the role the role of an insider or a distant relative who may have told the men about the cash in the house. Though police denied the men were I-T officials, they are probing if the men have worked in the I-T department in the past.