By Neeraj Mishra
What happens when two beautiful women approach you with an offer you can’t refuse. They don’t want money or favour, instead they are offering to quadruple your money by simply washing it. Seems implausible but a new wave of crime has hit cities across India from Mumbai to Chennai to Raipur and Nagpur. The booty so far is Rs 50 crore, the easiest money anyone has ever imagined to make.
Raipur Police have arrested Kaneez Fatima and her accomplice Deepika Paliwal in a robbery scheme when they offered a young businessman, Umesh Gupta of from Balod, which is close to Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur, to get him a fund of Rs 45 crore by simply washing black paper with an undisclosed imported chemical which turns it into hard cash. Any normal reaction to such a scheme would be a hearty laugh but not when two sincere and pretty women are talking about it in a hotel room and showing you how it is done.
Gupta ended up shelling out Rs 1.13 crore over six months for meeting with other conspirators, namely Abhishek Singh, Deepak Singh and Yogi. Methodically, they extracted money from Gupta by showing him how chemical is used on real notes provided by Gupta to double them. Gupta needed Rs 45 crore for his solar business and he fell for the easy money scam. While the process of making real notes black, and then cleaning them, and doubling them remains unclear but how the spell was cast on the victim is clear.
Fatima and Paliwal are part of a gang that recruits and trains women on how to entice men and con them. It involves a nicely knit process in which the victim is identified, his needs, greed and worth is appraised and then the net is cast. The women keep the victim entertained with clever talk and stories. All this is practised, sometimes for six months, police said. Dealing in fake currency carries a life sentence.
Also in the mix is a story of how hawala money from Dubai has landed and has been converted into black paper to store and keep it safe from the Enforcement Directorate and the police. This same black paper is washed and reconverted into money and then everyone can have their share. You invest one crore and you may end up getting four for it. As scams go, it sure is fun, so they are calling it the wash-wash scam.
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