NEW DELHI: A Madhya Pradesh resident has lodged a complaint with the Delhi Police alleging that some unknown miscreants have used his PAN card and Aadhar card numbers to generate a forged GST number with which they are fraudulently operating a private company that showed its annual turnover to be more than Rs 9 crore.
The complainant, Chandan Soni, had approached the Delhi Police, following which its Economic Offence Wing registered an FIR under relevant sections of the IPC and began a probe into the matter.
As per the FIR, exclusively accessed by this newspaper, Soni, a resident of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh, was filing his Income Tax Return in July 2022, when he discovered that his Permanent Account Number (PAN) had been allegedly misused to generate a fake GST number with which a private Delhi-based company named 'MG Sales' had been registered.
The company’s address was shown as somewhere in the Shahdara area in east Delhi, following which the Thatipur police station in Gwalior registered a zero FIR.
A zero FIR is a provision that allows any police station to register a cognisable offence without assigning an initial FIR number. Zero FIRs are assigned the number ‘0’.
However, the interesting part of Soni’s complaint is that the alleged company’s turnover for the financial year 2021–22 was reflected as Rs 9.10 crore and the last GST was filed in July 2022.
“The GST registration was shown effective in August 2021, and the Aadhaar authentication was done in January 2022. It is highly likely that the suspected people might have even opened a bank account in my name. It is a matter of investigation,” an excerpt from the FIR said.
Interestingly, just a couple of months ago, a similar case came to the fore where a student in Madhya Pradesh had filed a police complaint after he was shocked to see transactions of Rs 46 crores that had been fraudulently made through his bank account.
The student learned about the matter when he received a notice from the Income Tax and GST departments that a private company had been registered under his PAN card credentials, operating out of Mumbai and Delhi.