District Collector Archana Patnaik has asked the public not to be carried away by the tall claims made by persons running fraudulent finance firms. She was addressing the gathering at an awareness programme on economic offences held here on Monday.
The event was jointly organised by the Economic Offences Wing and Commercial Crime Investigation Wing of Crime Branch Criminal Investigation Division and the Revenue Department. The Collector also launched distribution of awareness pamphlets about fraudulent firms, which also had the helpline number where the public could call and inquire if a firm in which they wanted to invest was registered with RBI.
Inspector General of Police, EOW, Ashok Kumar Das said that the Scam Buster mobile number 9840584729 and the interactive voice response system number 044 - 64500155 have been a big hit among investors. He said that these numbers received a good number of calls for checking the authenticity of the firms. “Some of the callers have even lodged complaints against fraudulent firms,” he added.
In most of the cases, the affected depositors were retired persons, daily wage labourers and those from the poor and middle income groups.
The officers said that they deposit their hard earned money for their future, but were cheated.
According to the EOW officials, all non-banking financial institutions should be registered with the Reserve Bank of India.
The list of registered non-banking financial institutions is available online at the RBI website http://rbi.org.in/
commonman/english/
scripts/nbfcs.aspx.
Officials said that an intensive awareness on economic offences is the need of the hour as fraudulent firms were mushrooming and disappearing after cheating public of several crores of rupees.
A video on economic offences and strategies adopted by the firms for cheating the public was also screened. District Registrar (Chits) M. Muthu Kannan also spoke on the scams.
Participants expressed the need for awareness on such offences to be made online – on social networking sites – to reach the masses.
