New Delhi: A bank fraud accused, who had absconded with Rs 50 lakh twenty years ago, was finally apprehended by the CBI on Sunday. This followed an extensive and meticulously planned operation.At the time of his arrest, the accused was found masquerading as a sadhu in a village in Tamil Nadu. This was a clever disguise, but not the only one he had employed to evade capture. The accused had adopted multiple aliases and personas over the years, traveling extensively across the country to stay one step ahead of CBI investigators. His clever deceptions had kept the authorities guessing for decades.It all started on May 1, 2002, when the CBI launched an investigation into V Chalapathi Rao, a computer operator at the State Bank of Indias Chandulal Baradari branch in Hyderabad. Rao was accused of swindling the bank out of Rs 50 lakh by allegedly securing loans through forged quotations from electronics stores and fake salary certificates in the names of his family members and close acquaintances. The CBI subsequently filed two chargesheets in the case in December 2004, but Rao vanished soon after, leaving the authorities baffled and triggering a lengthy and complex manhunt.CBI ARRESTS PROCLAIMED OFFENDER IN A SBI HYDERABAD BRANCH FRAUD CASE pic.twitter.com/eXyZHrjCHS— Central Bureau of Investigation (India) (@CBIHeadquarters) August 5, 2024Wife implicates in fraud caseIn a surprising turn of events, Raos wife was also implicated in the fraud case, reported her husband missing to the Kamatipura police station on July 10, 2004. Seven years later, in 2011, she petitioned the civil court to declare him deceased, and the court subsequently issued a decree confirming his death.Meanwhile, with the primary accused still at large, the case against him was severed, and he was officially declared a proclaimed offender in April 2013 in connection with the CBI investigation. Furthermore, Raos wife successfully obtained a stay order from the Telangana High Court, temporarily halting attempts to seize her husbands assets in relation to the cheating case. According to information gathered by the CBI that Rao fled to Salem in Tamil Nadu, where he married a new woman in 2007 under the name M Vineet Kumar. He also got an Aadhaar number using this new identity.Accused uses multiple identities to evade CBIThrough his second wife, CBI officials discovered that Rao maintained contact with his son from his first marriage during his time in Salem. In 2014, Rao abruptly left Salem and moved to Bhopal where he worked as a loan recovery agent. He then relocated to Rudrapur in Uttarakhand, taking up a job at a school. However, by the time a CBI team arrived in Rudrapur in 2016, Rao had already fled.The CBI used email IDs and Aadhaar details in the name of M Vineet Kumar to track Raos movements. With the help of Googles law enforcement department, they found that Rao had moved to an ashram in Verul village, Aurangabad, where he assumed a new identity, Swami Vidhitatmanand Teertha, and obtained another Aadhaar card.Raos stay at the ashram ended in December 2021, when he allegedly cheated the managers out of Rs 70 lakh and left. He then moved to Bharatpur in Rajasthan, where he stayed until July 8, 2024. During this period, he frequently changed his contact numbers, nearly 10 times.The CBI received a tip that Rao planned to escape to Sri Lanka by sea. Acting on this information, officials finally tracked him down and arrested him on Sunday from Narasinganallur village in Tirunelveli. He was produced in court and remanded in judicial custody until August 16.
