The Hindu : Online conman does deft job

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jul 21, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Andhra Pradesh

Online conman does deft job

By Our Staff Reporter

VIJAYAWADA JULY 20. The City police sleuths are baffled at the ingenious method adopted by a man to hoodwink a Christian missionary organisation through the help of the Internet.

Having failed to track down the cheat who reportedly operated from a cyber cafe in Hyderabad, a police team is shortly expected to go to Mumbai on his trail.

According to the police, Rajender Kumar, who runs the Sivani Assembly Church engaged in social service at Singhnagar, some time ago received a letter. The letter purportedly written by Robert Boon, self-styled president of the Times Mission, claimed that the organisation was running a worldwide philanthropic network with its headquarters in Germany. Boon in his letter said that he was impressed by Kumar's missionary activities and offered to give him huge foreign donations to continue with the activities in India.

Subsequently, Boon gave him his e-mail ID for correspondence. When Mr Kumar e-mailed Boon willing to avail of the funds, Boon informed him that one of his representatives, John, would meet him. Thereafter, there was a lot of correspondence between Boon and Mr Kumar, after which the so-called Dr. John met Mr Kumar at the Singhnagar church.

John told Mr. Rajendra Kumar, his wife and other family members that the Times Mission had also sanctioned a Tata Sumo for the Shivani Assembly Chruch. He also asked the entire family to make preparations to go to Germany for attending an orientation camp and meet Dr Boon too. John told them that they should accompany him to Mumbai for picking up their Tata Sumo and also fulfil the visa formalities.

The unsuspecting Mr Kumar, his wife four other family members accompanied John to Mumbai. However, on reaching Mumbai, John collected about Rs 86,000 in cash from the family. He also asked Kumar's wife and other family members to remove their gold ornaments before entering a local church. After collecting the cash and the gold ornaments, all worth Rs 1.5 lakh, John gave the slip to the family. After waiting in vain for several hours, the family realised they were tricked and lodged a complaint with the Mumbai police on March 27 this year. However, in a case of typical dillydallying, the Mumbai police after arguing over the jurisdictional claims transferred the case last week to the city's Payakapuram police station.

Following the registration of the case, the North Circle CI, D V Nageswara Rao, and his team managed to track down the cyber cafe at LB Nagar in Hyderabad from where the self-styled Robert Boon alias Dr John exchanged the correspondence with the family of Mr Rajendra Kumar. Mr Nageswara Rao said they could not get any clues about the residential address of Boon and a police team would shortly go to Mumbai to locate his address.

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