Two brothers arrested for posing as ED officers, extorting money

Bhubaneswar: Two brothers were arrested in Dhenkenal district for allegedly posing as Enforcement Directorate officers and extorting money from government officials, police said on Sunday.

Tarinisen Mohapatra (30) and Brahmashankar Mohapatra (27) were arrested by the Special Task Force (STF) of Odisha Police from their home in Dhenkanal on Saturday. The brothers had borrowed a huge amount of money and were not being able to repay the lenders. So, they hatched a plan to cheat government employees, police said.

The STF sources said the investigation so far revealed that they chose “ED” because of the news coverage about various raids conducted by the agency. On the modus operandi, the STF said they would generally tell a government official that a case has been instituted against him based on a complaint from the Vigilance department relating to a corruption case and ED is about to begin the inquiry and raids against him. They asked for money to settle the so-called case.

Posing as “Additional Director of ED Bhubaneswar”, they contacted about 300 officers of different government departments of the State over the phone.

They succeeded in extorting money from some of the officers, and in total payments of more than Rs 16 lakh have been traced. They used to take payments through PhonePe and GPay, and issued fake “clearance letters” to the officers, clearing them of all “charges”.

They were arrested on the basis of a complaint lodged by Chhatrapur Sub-Collector Debadatta Mohanta, an STF officer said. A laptop, a desktop, five mobile phones, bank passbooks and chequebooks, fake ID cards and 17 ATM cards were seized from them,

he said.