Police have arrested a con artist who swindled a woman out of Rs 89 lakh by making her believe that he was a PMO staffer, an R&AW agent and an IB sleuth all rolled into one.
Rajajinagar resident Arahanth was suave when he met Sonul Saxena, 31, on a flight to Kuala Lumpur three years ago and introduced himself as a staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office. They exchanged numbers and met a few times in Bengaluru.
After some time, Saxena unsuccessfully applied for a visa to Italy and The Czech Republic. She asked him to find out why her application was turned down. He promised to do so. In January 2020, she got the visa. Arahanth told her the visa was approved with the “personal intervention” of the President’s personal assistant and embassy officials. Saxena was elated, and made the trip to Europe in February of that year.
In December 2020, Arahanth contacted Saxena, informing her that her 2019 visa application was rejected because some countries, including France, Austria, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, had “blacklisted” her. He scared her later, saying France, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic had booked her under an anti-terrorism law. He warned that her brother and his wife, who live in the US, were at risk of being expelled. Taking the scaremongering to another level, he claimed she would never get a visa to travel abroad and might lose her job, too.
Inexplicably, Sonul got so scared that she walked into his trap and implored him to bail her out. At this point in time, Arahanth revealed his second fake identity: that of an intelligence officer. He said he worked in the Delhi back office of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and promised to help her. But he had one condition: she needs to pay a bomb.
In September 2021, Arahanth told Sonul that Austria, the Czech Republic and Italy had agreed to drop the charges against her if she paid a fine of 7.5 lakh euros (over Rs 6 crore). She bargained this down and transferred Rs 89 lakh to a bank account between February and September last year. He promised the money will be returned after 10 years. He then took her passport, saying France had asked for it.
To make her believe him, Arahanth once took her to the Whitefield police station and the offices of the CID and senior cops. There, he pretended to be following up on her case. “At the CID office, he posed as an intelligence officer. No officer asked for his ID because the posts he mentioned are respectable and sensitive,” said S Girish, DCP (Whitefield).
Arahanth was finally arrested on April 28 by Bellandur police inspector Mahendra Kumar K H. Police said he was jobless but travelled abroad regularly, which might have given him the idea of cheating foreign travellers. Police have frozen his 16 bank accounts, travel documents as well as a book in which he had jotted down his expenses and money transactions. Police are questioning him in custody.
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