Engineer poses as judge, IAS officer to con people in Delhi, Gurugram; arrested

The police, on Sunday, arrested a 29-year-old engineer for allegedly duping at least 40 people in Gurugram and Delhi using two aliases.

The accused would sometimes posed as a senior civil judge from Telangana and at other times he’d be an IAS officer posted at AllMS in New Delhi. He promised school admissions, jobs and houses to desperate people in lieu of a few lakh rupees and lived it large. Once he got the payment, he’d flee. But not on Sunday.

Identified as Kedarnath Sagar Sharma, the accused used to allegedly take between ₹3 and ₹5 lakh for government flats, which he promised he could acquire using as his influence as a “judge on deputation in Gurugram from Telangana”. The accused, posing as a judge, had also stayed at the PWD Rest House in the city once on May 2, police said.

He’d offer government jobs at AIIMS by posing as an IAS officer posted at the hospital, and the going rate for admission in a Kendriya Vidyalaya was around ₹40,000. He’d taken such payments from parents of over two dozen students in Delhi, police said, adding that a Delhi-based property dealer had been helping Sharma reach out to parents who were willing to pay to secure admissions for their wards in central government-run schools.

The police are on the lookout for this property dealer.

Sharma spent the money he got by duping people mostly on partying at different locations and on expensive liquor, a police officer privy to the case said, adding that he even bought a second-hand BMW 5 series car, with the registration plate of a senior judge, to add a dash of reality to his con.

“Since March, he has visited Mumbai and Goa with friends and spent about a month and a half there partying. Last month, he had gone to Thailand with his friends,” said an officer privey to details of the case.

Sharma, who hails from Hyderabad, was arrested on Sunday after one of the men he took money from promising him a flat under Economically Weaker Section (EWS) category lodged a complaint. An FIR was filed under sector 420 (cheating), 170 (personating a public servant) of the Indian Penal Code, at Sector 14 Police Station against the accused for cheating a man of ₹4 lakh.

The police also seized the BMW car, fake seals, fake appointment letters and a fake identity card of a senior civil judge he has been using. “He made the fake identity card himself and then took a printout,” assistant commissioner of police Shamsher Singh said.

“This happened about two months ago. When the victim did not get his flat or his money, he approached the police on Saturday and we filed an FIR on Sunday,” assistant sub-inspector Trilok Chand, who is the investigating officer in the case, said.

Later in the day, the accused was taken in for questioning, following which he was arrested and sent to police custody for seven days.

Sharma, a BTech in computer engineering from a college in Hyderabad in 2011, had worked with at least two companies, one in Hyderabad and another in Mumbai before he moved to Gurugram in March this year, Sector 14 station house officer Deepak Kumar said.

Chand said Gurugram Police has contacted their Telangana counterparts for more details on Sharma and to know whether he had any criminal background.