How ex-bankers were busted in personal loan scam: Fake salaries, phoney govt IDs

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• Delhi Police arrested three men for a personal loan fraud using fake identities
• Accused used banking expertise to embezzle lakhs from financial institutions.
• Probe continues to find more beneficiaries and evaluate total financial loss

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After more than six years of alleged deception, the Delhi Police Crime Branch arrested three men on December 29 for orchestrating a sophisticated personal loan fraud that relied on fake government identities and forged salary trails. The accused, officials said, exploited their prior experience in the banking sector to game loan approval systems and siphon off lakhs of rupees from financial institutions.

According to a report by The Indian Express, those arrested have been identified as Atul Agarwal alias Manish Kumar (40), a resident of Patna in Bihar; Ajay Chaurasia (46) from Nihal Vihar in Delhi; and Deepak Dhoundiyal (49) from Dehradun in Uttarakhand. According to police, all three had previously worked in banking and were well aware of the checks involved in sanctioning personal loans.

The arrests were made by the Western Range-II unit of the Crime Branch after a prolonged investigation into a scam that allegedly began in 2019. Officials said the trio, along with other associates, created a façade of stable government employment to become eligible for loans offered at preferential rates.

The case first came to light in 2022, when Loknarayan Karotiya, an assistant manager at Bajaj Finance, noticed irregularities while reviewing loan account statements at his Pitampura office, the report said. He observed that EMIs were repeatedly bouncing from salary accounts linked to three individuals who were shown as employees posted at the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) building on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg.

Suspecting something amiss, Karotiya reportedly instructed his staff to physically verify the borrowers’ employment. When his team visited the office of the Principal Director of Commercial Audit at the CAG building -- listed as the borrowers’ workplace — they found that none of the three individuals had ever worked there. An FIR later recorded that the loans had been obtained using fabricated documents.

According to police records, one accused had taken a loan of Rs 9.8 lakh, another Rs 10 lakh, and a third Rs 8.5 lakh from Bajaj Finance in 2019. To secure these amounts, they allegedly posed as government officials with designations such as Senior Audit Officer, submitting forged government identity cards and income proofs.

An internal inquiry by Bajaj Finance further revealed a suspicious pattern: the salary accounts linked to the borrowers were being almost completely emptied soon after the monthly “salary” amounts were credited. In September 2022, Karotiya formally lodged a complaint against the three men and another individual named Anirudh, prompting a criminal investigation.

Explaining the modus operandi, police said the gang would first identify and persuade individuals to lend their identities for the scheme. Forged documents were then prepared, and bank accounts were opened in the names of these recruits. For several months, money was transferred into these accounts from shell or fraudulent company accounts, with transaction remarks deliberately marked as “salary”.

This consistent inflow of salary-like credits, officers said, made the accounts appear legitimate. Banks would then extend personal loan offers typically reserved for salaried government employees perceived to have stable incomes, it said. “As soon as the salary accounts received a loan offer from a bank, they would apply for it,” DCP (Crime Branch) Harsh Indora said.

To reduce the risk of early suspicion, the accused allegedly paid EMIs for a few months after receiving the loan. Once sufficient time had passed, repayments would stop altogether. The person whose identity had been used would be paid a small amount, while the bulk of the loan money was shared among the gang members, police said.

Investigators said Agarwal, educated up to Class 10, personally posed as “Manish Kumar” and secured a loan using a fake government employee profile. Chaurasia, who studied till Class 8, was allegedly responsible for opening bank accounts and arranging salary credits to make them appear authentic.

Dhoundiyal, a graduate, is believed to have played a key role in navigating verification procedures due to his familiarity with banking processes. “To earn easy money, Dhoundiyal got involved in the crime,” an officer said.

To crack the case, the Crime Branch constituted a special team that carried out raids at more than two dozen locations before finally apprehending the accused. Police said further investigation is ongoing to identify other beneficiaries, trace additional members of the network, and assess the total financial loss caused by the fraud.