Insurance manager held for cheating pastor in Ongole

Ongole: The Prakasam district police arrested a man, who cheated a pastor for more than Rs 1.50 crores by means of cash, gold, and land, on Friday.

Ongole DSP KVVNV Prasad said that Shaik Gulab Jani, a sales manager in Apollo Munich Insurance worked as the Manager of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance in Nellore in 2017. In May 2017, pastor Chinnapa Reddy of RCM Church in Chimakurthy met him to pay the insurance premium installment of his maternal uncle and made well acquainted with him.

Cashing on the innocence of pastor, Jani informed him that the bank provides higher interest rates on cash deposits, even without any document proofs like PAN Card. He collected Rs 25 lakh from the pastor from September 2017 to August 2018 and used to pay interest on it. Later, he started threatening the pastor that income tax officials are going to arrest him and extorted Rs 19.25 lakh and 450 grams of gold with deceitful words to pay to the income tax officials.

He once again convinced the pastor that he is still due Rs16 lakh as income tax and threatened to register a land of Rs 1 crore worth in his name as a mortgage.

In August 2019, Jani once again came to the pastor and made him sell his car, to pay money to the income tax officers to save him from arrest.

Unable to withstand the torture, the pastor approached the police and the SP ordered the Ongole DSP and rural police to investigate the case. The police team arrested Jani on Friday and recovered cash of Rs 30 lakh, gold of 200 grams, promissory notes, cheque books and land documents to a total worth of Rs 1.36 crore from the accused.