Bank fraudster presumed dead traced after 20 years

A BANK fraud accused who has been evading the law for over two decades and even declared dead by a local court was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Times of India reports.

The CBI nabbed the accused from a village in Tamil Nadu, where he was living disguised as a sadhu. He had earlier lived under different aliases in many states.

The accused, V Chalapathi Rao, used to work as a computer operator at a State Bank of India branch at Hyderabad in 2002 and swindled Rs 5 million from the bank.

He had availed loans using fabricated documents and sale deeds. His wife had filed a missing complaint in 2004 and later in 2011 filed a petition to declare him as dead as he had been missing for over seven years.

The CBI in 2013 declared him a proclaimed offender and began an investigation.

They found that he had fled to Salem in Tamil Nadu and assumed a different identity with Aadhaar number to his new name M Vineet Kumar. He even got married to a woman there.

He left Salem in 2014 and moved to Bhopal, where he worked as a recovery agent, and then left for Rudrapur in Uttarakhand, where he worked at a school.

When CBI reached Rudrapur, Rao had fled and while tracking his Aadhaar details and email they found he had become a swami at an ashram in Aurangabad. He had also changed his name again and obtained a fresh Aadhaar card.

Subsequently, he moved to Bharatpur in Rajasthan and later this year moved to Tirunelveli. He changed his contact number 10 times and was planning to escape to Sri Lanka.

But the CBI nabbed him and produced him before a court in Hyderabad, where he was remanded in judicial custody till August 16.