Fraudsters cheat ASCI Hyderabad office; complaint filed

Fraudsters cheat ASCI Hyderabad office; complaint filed
x
Highlights

The Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) almost fell into the trap laid by some fraudsters recently. However, the ASCI officials realised about the fraud and lodged a complaint with the police.The fraudsters floated a tender in the name of Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Ministry of HRD, Government of India inviting tenders for monitoring and evaluation projects of central sponsored

Hyderabad: The Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) almost fell into the trap laid by some fraudsters recently. However, the ASCI officials realised about the fraud and lodged a complaint with the police.The fraudsters floated a tender in the name of Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Ministry of HRD, Government of India inviting tenders for monitoring and evaluation projects of central sponsored schemes in various States.

The tender was posted on the website tendersinfo.com, which collates all tenders in different public platforms and sends an email to its clients.Since ASCI is one of the clients for the website, it received the information and found the tender purported to have floated by CDS to be in its domain of expertise and decided to file tender for the projects.

ASCI officials initiated the process of preparation of the documents such as earnest money deposit of Rs 50,000, fee of Rs 10,500 per person towards training faculty members in the client organisation and performance bank guarantee of one percent of the value of the total contract.

While going through the process, ASCI officials grew suspicious since the bank details forwarded by the organisation that floated the tender were of an individual and not of any organisation.Immediately, ASCI officials cross checked the mobile phone numbers of the so-called key people from CDS through the True Caller Verification only to find that all the numbers were registered in the name of one person – Amjad Sohail Ahmed.

ASCI then asked its Resident Manager of the New Delhi campus to make physical verification of the three addresses provided in the tender advertisement. But the addresses could not be located. Then ASCI stopped further payments as Amjad Sohail, who had been corresponding with it, began giving evasive replies when asked about the addresses.

Amjad Sohail, who had been corresponding with ASCI claiming him-self to be the authorised person from CDS, gave the account number of a woman Zahira Rafiz, having account with Axis Bank in Pune. It was not clear how ASCI officials fell into the trap when the account number given to them pertains to an individual instead of the organisation.

However, they noticed the fraud only after making initial payments and lodged a complaint with the Central Crime Station. Police said the investigation is underway and the culprits are yet to be nabbed.

Show Full Article
Print Article
Next Story
More Stories
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENTS