Hyderabad: An engineering dropout, who targeted techies willing to share their flats and siphoned money from their accounts, was arrested on Friday.
The suspect Koneru Anwesh (28) used to approach techies seeking to rent flats, steal their ATM cards and siphon amounts from their accounts. Madhapur DCP A. Venkateswar Rao said invoking PD Act provisions against the suspect was under consideration.
Accused
According to police, Anwesh from Warangal district moved to Hyderabad and lived with his younger brother at Bachupally. Anwesh started working as an event manager and his brother Charan was an IT employee. As event manager working in Hyderabad and Pune, his earnings made him lead a lavish life. He took to cheating people for easy money.
He would search for flats available for sharing on 'Flats and Flatmates group' page on Facebook and approach people directly under the guise of seeking flats on sharing basis.
After meeting the person, he would take the inmate into confidence, and under the guise of wanting to talk to his parents, take their mobile. He would claim that his phone was not working. “In between, when the flatmate was engaged in some work, he would steal their debit cards from the wallet. He would then make a call to the phone banking service and reset the PIN,” said the DCP. Based on the CCTV footage from ATM booths, police began investigation but to no avail. But on analysing the accounts of the victims, they found the amounts were transferred to a PayTM wallet, which belonged to an IT employee Charan.
On questioning Charan, police zeroed in on Anwesh who came to pick his brother and nabbed him. Charan was completely unaware of his brother’s fraudulent acts. Anwesh had cheated seven techies in different areas and siphoned off Rs 3.71 lakh from them in less than two months. An amount of Rs 3.29 lakh in cash was recovered from him.
