The city police have arrested three brothers of the family from whose Howrah flat and parked vehicle cops had seized around Rs 8 crore.
The police had found that they were allegedly involved in running a racket to dupe people on the pretext of training people in forex trading.
Shailesh Pandey, 49, and his brothers Rohit Pandey, 29, and Arvind Kumar Pandey, 35, were arrested from Rourkela in Odisha on Thursday, the police said. Another man named Prasenjit Das has been arrested from Ahmedabad.
“Shailesh Pandey and his brothers are the prime accused in this case. They have been running the racket to dupe people over the years. We received the alert from the bank that spotted suspicious transactions in two of their accounts at a Narendrapur branch,” said a senior officer of the bank fraud section at Lalbazar.
Diamond-encrusted gold and silver jewellery and Rs 2.5 crore in cash were seized from inside a car parked in the garage of a housing complex at Shibpur in Howrah during a raid by Kolkata police on October 16. Later, the flat was broken open and Rs 5 crore in cash was found, the police said.
The car — an Ertiga — is registered in the name of Shailesh Pandey’s brother Arvind, who is one of the three persons arrested on Thursday, the police said.
During the investigation, the police were said to have found more than a dozen bank accounts that had been opened with false documents and were allegedly used for making fraudulent transactions.
Das, the police said, was allegedly instrumental in opening the bank accounts allegedly used in the fraud. The four were presented before the chief metropolitan magistrate on Friday and were remanded in police custody till November 2.
Das’s defence lawyer said he was only an employee and that his documents were fraudulently used by the three alleged masterminds to open bank accounts, which were operated by the trio.
The public prosecutor, however, said there was a larger conspiracy behind the cheating racket that duped many in name of rendering training in forex trading.
“The investigating agency has found evidence that at least Rs 77 crore was transacted through the bank accounts through fraudulent means,” the public prosecutor said.
He added that there was a need for an in-depth investigation of the matter for which police remand was needed.
The Pandey brothers, who had been evading arrest since last week, had look-out notices issued against them after cops seized the alleged unaccounted cash and jewellery from their car and flat but did not find them in their Howrah flat. After hearing both sides, the magistrate sent the four to police remand.
