Chennai: Two school dropouts conned educated youths in a village by posing as senior officials at the state secretariat and managed to earn several lakhs promising government jobs. They hit upon an ingenious scheme of moving around in a car with a beacon light with a security officer in uniform. Adding to the dramatic effect were some smooth talking skills that floored even the village panchayat head, the Village Administrative Officer and the revenue inspector.
The con could easily have come out of a movie plot, except that those fooled were real people of Olayur village in Ariyalur district. The smart duo, in connivance with two others, managed to cheat the village youths of lakhs by promising them government jobs about three months ago. Their streak was brought to an end with the Central Crime Branch officials of the city police arresting all four on Tuesday evening. Police said that they were acting based on a complaint by C. Selvam, 29, a B.E. graduate who was one of the conned youth.
Preliminary investigations at the village led the CCB officials to S.Karthikeyan alias Karthik, 22 of Perambur, the class 10 dropout, who eventually turned out to be the mastermind behind the racket. Karthikeyan’s sister-in-law from his second marriage is a native of Olaiyur and he used to visit the place often, an investigating official said. Noticing that there were a lot of unemployed graduates in the village, he along with his friend, R. Arun, 19, also from Perambur, devised a plan to cheat them.
They had sought the help of Mariasoosai Gabriel, 22 B.A, a Villupuram native who works at a computer center in Egmore and N. Sandeep, 23 of Vyasarpadi. While Mariasoosai helped the duo prepare fake appointment orders, Sandeep helped the duo instal the beacon light and a government symbol apart from rendering his services as a driver to the fake bureaucrat, S. Jeyakumar, CCB Deputy Commissioner said.
According to the official, Karthikeyan had claimed to be an Additional Director in the Adi Dravida and tribal welfare department and had told the youths that he could get them jobs in the CM cell. Arun, who played the role of an assistant security officer (ASO) to Karthikeyan also acted as one who got the job under the scheme. The school dropouts managed to stage a full-fledged counseling session in the presence of village heads and charged as many as '65,000 to '1lakh from 20 youths and fled the place after issuing fake appointment orders. All of them were arrested and remanded to judicial custody.
Further investigations are on.
