New Delhi: The Delhi police crime branch has arrested an accused who duped people for allegedly selling fake rice- pullers by posing as a scientist.
Confirming the arrested, DCP (Crime) Bhisham Singh said the accused, identified as Nilesh Mishra (37) resided in Najafgarh. Mr Singh added the police had previously arrested a father-son duo with the same modus operandi.
The accused has been sent for two-day custody. The police said that the accused was arrested on Wednesday. Mishra was the boss of the father-son duo, who were arrested in May, but then started a separate gang of his own.
The accused used to pose as a scientist to dupe people into investing in his scientific project, said the police. The police is checking whether he had duped other persons on the pretext of providing the rice puller (anything that attracts iron is a rice puller)
The father-son duo too had allegedly duped a man of Rs 1.43 crore on the pretext of testing a rice puller device, which, they claimed, would later be sold to United States’ space agency, NASA for Rs 37,500 crore.
The police said that the father-son duo had cheated at least 30 people from Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand among other places.
The accused, Virender Mohan Brar and his son Nitin Mohan Brar, had claimed they wanted to test the device, a “rare piece of copper struck by thunderbolt giving it the power to pull rice”.
They had allegedly told the complainant that if the test was successful, they would sell it to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for Rs 37,500 crore
“Rice puller is a non-existent thing,” said Alok Kumar, the joint commissioner of police crime branch. “The cheats take a copper plate or utensil and coat it with liquid magnet, and then fill some boiled rice with small iron filings and fool the victim by pulling the rice grain towards the magnet-coated copper article.”
Instances of cheating related to the imaginary “rice puller” have been reported earlier too, in Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai.
