Fake intelligence officer held for duping woman out of Rs 89 lakh: Police

A 33-year-old man has been arrested in Bengaluru for allegedly duping a woman out of Rs 89 lakh after claiming to be working in the Prime Minister Office and promising to help her with a visa.
Police said that Arahanth Mohan Kumar Lakkavalli, a resident of Rajajinagar in Bengaluru who had claimed he worked with the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), which report to the Prime Minister’s Office, was a B Com graduate and a real estate agent. He was arrested on Wednesday.
According to the police, Mohan Kumar introduced himself as an IB officer when he met the woman on a flight to Kuala Lumpur in June 2019. The woman had her application for Italian and Czech Republic visas rejected. In January 2020, she got a visa but wanted to find out why her application had been rejected before. Kumar, who offered to help her, said her passport had been placed on a blacklist and that she had been booked for “suspected terrorist activities act”.
As she sought his help to clear her name, Kumar allegedly said he would have to pay 5 lakh euros ( approximately Rs 4 crore) to authorities in Austria and Czech Republic and 2 lakh euros ( approximately Rs 2 crore) to those in Italy. In February and September of 2021, the woman claimed to have transferred Rs 89 lakh to him for the purpose. When there was no response from him, the woman filed a complaint with the Bellandur police on April 26.
The police arrested him the next day and found out that he had also collected a lot of documents from the woman. He carried a notebook with details of his travels to various parts of the country and abroad. He has also visited police stations with the woman looking for some sensitive information, according to the police. But the officers whom he met in these offices had no clue he was posing as an IB officer, the police said.
Deputy Commissioner of police (Whitefield) S Girish said, “He has travelled to many countries in Europe and other places. He is not cooperating with the investigation. We suspect he might have cheated others as well as he did not have an income big enough to support these foreign trips. We have frozen his bank accounts and are yet to recover money.”