Ahmedabad, Sep 8 (PTI) The Gujarat police have nabbed a man from Jharkhand for allegedly duping many vehicle owners from Ahmedabad city by sending them a fake e-challan payment link of a website that resembled the government portal, an official said on Friday.

Sudhanshu Mishra (25) allegedly collected “lakhs of rupees” from several vehicle owners in the city by asking them to pay the fine for their traffic violations on “echallan.parivahan.in”, a fake website he created with his accomplices to dupe unsuspecting people, the city crime branch stated in a release.

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As per the release, whenever the CCTV cameras in the city detect a traffic violation, the traffic police capture a photograph of the vehicle and send it to the National Informatics Centre with the necessary details about the vehicle and its owner.

Later, the owner gets a message and a payment link on his or her registered mobile number from the official government website “echallan.parivahan.gov.in” for online payment of the fine, it stated.

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The city crime branch recently came across some cases wherein a person, who identified himself as a policeman working with the Ahmedabad traffic police, had called vehicle owners on their mobile phones and asked them to pay the fine using a link from a similar website called “echallan.parivahan.in”.

A case of cheating was then registered with the cyber crime branch police station against unidentified fraudsters a couple of weeks ago, it said.

Following a probe, the city crime branch nabbed Mishra, the alleged mastermind of the scam, from a village in Deoghar district of Jharkhand and brought him here on Friday, the release said.

Mishra, a former stockbroker, told the police that he had learned the trick from a man named Rajesh in Kolkata a few months ago and he then returned to his native place and involved his friend Saptam Kumar and one Paltan Das to carry out the fraud targeting Ahmedabad residents, it was stated.

Mishra first acquired details of traffic violators against whom a challan was already issued from a portal of the Ahmedabad traffic police. After getting the contact numbers of such vehicle owners from another website, Mishra called them posing as an official of the city traffic police, the release said.

Since the payment link was similar to that of the official Parivahan website, many people fell into Mishra's trap and paid lakhs of rupees through that fake payment link, it stated.

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