NEW DELHI: Reconnaissance in the dead of night, communicating through secure messenger applications to evade the eyes of the law and the stolen cars ultimately sold off after being replaced with total loss accidental vehicles - this was a well-oiled strategy adopted by a gang of automobile thieves in the city.
Even some big-time gangsters were utilising their services as the “auto lifter gang” were providing the stolen vehicles to the members of infamous Gogi gang.
The gang would have continued their nefarious activities in the city had the Crime Branch not received crucial input from an informer about their recent carjacking following which the three accused - Gurmeet (35), Kuldeep (45) and Jasbeer (39), all residents of Alipur, were caught on Friday.
“The kingpin of the gang was Kuldeep, who was previously found involved in more than 20 criminal cases of Delhi-NCR,” DCP (Crime Branch) Vikram Singh said.
Kuldeep was recently released from jail and in order to arrange funds for the marriage of his daughter he again became involved in the same kind of offence of stealing vehicles.
It was Kuldeep who used to do recce of the vehicles in late hours which could be stolen. Interestingly, even after stealing the vehicle, the accused people would not drive it away to far places; instead, they used to park the vehicle nearby - a place where the cops would mostly avoid looking.
Once the car was stolen, the second accused Jasbeer used to arrive and check the vehicle whether there was GPS installed or not.
“They all did not use phone numbers to communicate with each other but used to communicate on the ‘Zangi’ application which doesn’t store user data on central servers and makes it difficult for third parties to access user data and phone calls,” the DCP said.
The third trick which kept the gang making tonnes of money was the most vital - after stealing expensive cars, the accused used to sell those to the scrappers who further gave those cars after replacing them with accidental total loss vehicles and altering their engine numbers and chassis numbers as well as the registration number plates.
Interrogation of the accused people revealed that they also used to provide the stolen vehicles to the gang members of the Gogi Gang.