The Delhi police have busted a Rs. 300-crore real estate fraud with the arrest of an alleged fake builder, Manoj Bhardwaj, who was running several bogus companies in the Capital.
The police have received over 450 complaints against the accused from home buyers in Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR) over the past few years, and suspect that many more are yet to seek legal action against him.
Bhardwaj, who projected himself as a builder/land dealer, operated in a manner similar to the script of Bollywood film Khosla ka Ghosla, in which a family sells off a government plot by faking it as its property.
Bhardwaj also took his prospective buyers on a trip to plots that did not belong to him, said Ishwar Singh, DCP (South).
The lands Bhardwaj showed to the victims would have boards of his fake companies, most of which began with ‘Arun Dev’. “Initially, Bhardwaj started a company in the name of Arun Dev Builders Pvt. Ltd. Later, he started many other sister companies in the names of his relatives,” said the DCP on Tuesday.
The Economic Offences Wings of the police in Delhi, Gurgaon and Faridabad had several received complaints against Bhardwaj from his clients. Many complaints were also being lodged at South Delhi’s Neb Sarai police station as the address mentioned in the receipts given to the victims mentioned the area. The South District police constituted a team and nabbed the accused from Devli village last week after receiving a tip-off on his movement.
Bhardwaj’s modus operandi was simple. He would lure prospective plot buyers through advertisements in newspapers. When a buyer would approach him, he would show the person vacant plots claiming that new colonies would come up there.
