RTO officials uncovered an alleged road tax evasion scam where owners of high-end vehicles procure fake registration numbers from other states, forge documents and illegally access official records to alter details while applying for a transfer of vehicle to Karnataka.
Based on a complaint filed by B.K. Nefanand, Regional Transport Officer, Bengaluru East, the Ramamurthy Nagar police arrested one person and registered a case against a vehicle owner for cheating and forgery. “Considering the inter-state ramification, the case has been transferred to the CCB police for a detailed probe,” said an official.
The racket came to light when RTO officials were verifying the details of a high-end car, which originally had a West Bengal registration. They reached out to their counterparts in West Bengal to verify the vehicle tax records to find that the registration number in the document was not that of the car, but of a motorcycle .
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They checked the chassis and registration numbers of the vehicle on the central transport department official website to find that the car was actually registered in Himachal Pradesh. Someone had hacked into the State transport website to manipulate documents of the high-end card to evade taxes. The police suspect this was not a one-off incident.