BENGALURU: Three persons who extorted the joint director to Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board (KIADB) by claiming to be Lokayukta officers and threatening to raid the house have been arrested by the Siddapura police.
The accused have been identified as Nageshwar Reddy Uppaloor (33), Buchupalli Vineet Kumar Reddy (22) and Shivakumar Reddy (19), all residents of Kadapa district in Andhra Pradesh. The kingpin of the racket, Srinath Reddy, is absconding and efforts are on to trace him.
The police said that Asha Bharath, Joint Director (Town Planning) of the KIADB, filed a complaint on March 21 stating that a person had contacted her the previous day and introduced himself as an official from the Karnataka Lokayukta. The caller allegedly threatened her that he would prepare a report against her and submit it to the ADGP and raid her house in the morning.
To stop the same, he demanded Rs 1 lakh. As per his instruction, the money was transferred online to the bank account number given by him.“Based on her complaint, information was gathered about the accused and three were arrested. Investigations revealed that the accused were running the racket of extorting government officials by claiming themselves as Lokayukta and ACB officials since 2013.
They had purchased SIM cards and opened bank accounts using fake credentials to avoid detection. They collected the phone numbers of government servants on official websites and demanded money from them. It is found that they have extorted several officials in Karnataka and we are investigating into the same,” the police said, adding five mobile phones have been seized from the accused.
Uppaloor, a diploma holder in mining, had worked as a section engineer with the Railways and also with the Uranium Corporation of India for a brief period. He has 32 criminal cases against him in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the police added.