Yet another Harshad Mehta?

Some years back, Harshad Mehta was famous in Indian house hold names all for wrong reasons. Especially if you are upper middle-class and with the I-do-trading-too person, you would have certainly known this person and probably lost some money with him too.

This morning, I read an article which might completely overshadow Harsha Mehta episode. This was about an Indian couple held for stock market scam to the tune of ..hold your breathe..1,100 Crore Rupees. And the Modus Operandi was quite an interesting ... but their promise and premise had SCAM written all over it with 20% return on capital per month..And definitely the below face had that written in Bold letters too. Let us see in detail..
Excerpt from this times of India article:

NEW DELHI: After a hunt lasting more than a year-and-a-half, police have arrested a couple for duping around 2 lakh people in one of India's biggest investment frauds involving an estimated Rs 1,100 crore.

The accused — Ulhas Prabhakar Khaire, 33, and his wife Raksha J Urs, 30 — had floated a company, Stock Guru India, promising to double investors' money in six months. They had launched a high-profile promotional campaign and even roped in celebrities.

Masters of disguise, the couple had changed their names to Lokeshwar Dev Jain and Priyanka Dev Jain while running the company and disappeared with the investors' money.

Delhi Police's economic offences wing nabbed the couple from Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, where they had opened another fake investment company. Police said the couple changed their looks and assumed new names based on stolen identities for each of their fraudulent operations.

The scam came to light around April last year after investors complained to the police. In Delhi alone, cops have received 14,303 complaints from investors who had put in money ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 60 lakh in Stock Guru India.

Delhi Police and its chartered accountants have so far estimated that Ulhas Prabhakar Khaire and his wife Raksha J Urs, promoters of Stock Guru India, cheated investors of Rs 493 crore but they say it may reach Rs 1,100 crore after the entire list of victims is exhausted.

Police have recovered deposits, cash and investments worth Rs 63 crore from Ulhas and Raksha, including eight flats in Dwarka. The victims were spread across many states —Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Haryana,Sikkim and Maharashtra.

Before launching Stock Guru India, the couple had started a fake college in Dehradun using different identities and collected money from prospective students on the promise of giving them diplomas in psychotherapy.

The two operated 94 bank accounts in 20 banks using 13 different identities and invested in properties with the victim's money. The Income Tax department had conducted a raid at the company in January this year and recovered Rs 44 crore. After this, Ulhas, who had been on the run since June last year, had claimed on his website that he was unable to return investors' money due to the IT raid and had even claimed to have left the country for the United States, said sources. A look out notice had been issued against the couple last year.

Ulhas and his wife had floated Stock Guru India in 2010, without registering with the ReserveBank of India or Securities Exchange Board of India ( SEBI), and arranged shows and seminars in hotels, with even some celebrities promoting his company, used facebook and internet to lure people describing itself as a "premier financial consultancy" company.

"Through Stock Guru India, in which they made themselves directors, the couple promised lucrative returns against promissory notes. They had guaranteed to provide a 20% return per month up to six months on the principal amount followed by a subsequent refund of the principal amount in the seventh month, through 'prudent and source-based investments' in theshare market," Joint Commissioner of Police (EOW) Sandeep Goel said.

 

Master of Disguise and the whole pattern was strangely reminding me of this hindi film: Bunty Aur Bubli..
Image source from Wiki

As long as Greedy errr.. Avarice people who believe 20% return on capital monthly is possible and strongly believing the likes of Tata, Ambani's and Bill Gates were joking themselves in struggling hard to build their wealth instead of these cheap easy tricks, there will never be a dearth of new schemes and scams and more importantly the Bunties and Bublies!!