Telangana police are not relying only on traditional network of informants to catch offenders. Even the Internet has become source of information for them, be it Facebook or pictures posted on social media. That is how a 32-year-old man, accused of duping three banks of ₹1.5 crore, was caught on Thursday by the Hyderabad police Task Force. The accused, Kumbham Ranga Reddy, had managed to secure 125 credit cards from the banks by producing fictitious documents.
Police said that after a bank lodged complaint, the Task Force sleuths of North Zone launched the investigation and started searching for him on Facebook and other social media sites.
“We found a person with the same identity on Facebook, who had posted his pictures with a green fancy bike. Soon, we launched a search to identify the bike and tried to verify it with various sources including e-challans,” said an officer associated with the investigation. Further, as part of the investigation, we came to know that Reddy siphoned off some amount from one of those credit cards to pay the installment for his bike.
e-challan scrutiny
“When we got the registration number of the vehicle, we examined the e-challans issued on it and further found that the owner had presented fictitious documents to purchase the vehicle and submitted a wrong mobile number,” he said.
The police also found that Reddy had bought a car, paid the EMI through those credit cards and submitted a communication number, which was active. “With the help of that number,we narrowed down a cell tower radius of 2 km and started a search operation in every lane and by-lane of that area,” the investigator said.
After two days, we found the same fancy bike parked near a house and after a thorough profiling, the police picked him up. “Facebook, e-challans and cell tower location helped us nab the accused,” the police said.
