Man poses as Indian vice president to scam bureaucrats

An Italy-based man of Indian origin tried to dupe people and seek favours from senior Indian bureaucrats by posing as the vice president of the country, Jagdeep Dhankhar.

The 22-year-old man,who hails from Jammu in India, has been identified as Gagandeep Singh. He works as a labourer in Italy and is a resident of Offanengo. He had moved to the country in 2007 with his family.

Singh was arrested at the Delhi airport by the police last week. Authorities had been looking for him for a while and managed to nab him after an extensive investigation.

According to local media reports, Singh carried out the scam with the help of an associate based in India. His 29-year-old associate, Ashwani Kumar, runs a shop in Samana, Punjab. He, too, has been arrested for the crime.

Singh created a number of fake WhatsApp accounts using Indian mobile numbers and put the vice president's photo as the profile picture for these accounts.

He would then reach out to senior government officials, asking for undue favours such as the allotment of a petrol pump station so he could eventually own one in India. The police said that he managed to get their mobile numbers from the internet.

He hatched the plan to impersonate India's vice president after watching a few YouTube videos. The police were informed of the scam last year in October, following which a case was registered in India. They reached out to WhatsApp's parent company, Meta, to retrieve information on these fake profiles.

"The team started working on all technical aspects and conducted raids, following which a person identified as Ashwani Kumar, a resident of Samana in Punjab, was apprehended who had shared an OTP with the imposter to create the WhatsApp account," said Prashant Gautam, the deputy commissioner of police in the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police.

"The IP address of the sender was traced back to Italy. The IFSO team started working on all technical aspects and conducted raids," Gautam told the news agency PTI. After a thorough investigation, police managed to catch him at Delhi Airport. They also seized five mobile phones from his possession.

The vice president's office was completely aware of the scam being carried out in his name.