Visa agent held for spoof calls to politicos
In what the Anti-Terrorism Squad claims is a first-of-its-kind arrest in the country, a Bandra visa and passport agent was arrested for making “spoof calls” to several senior politicians, and threatening them.
The accused would clone numbers of business rivals and angry customers, and then use their numbers to make threatening calls to senior politicians, so that they could land in the police’s net.
“Around seven to eight politicians had given us written complaints since February last year. We would then track down the people whose numbers were displayed on the cellphones. But while we could find incoming call records on the receivers’ phone, we could not find the outgoing record on the phones of those to whom the calls were traced to,” said a senior ATS officer.
The officer said that their cyber team and officers from the Juhu unit spent 14 months before zeroing in on Mohammed Mufiz Shahbandari, a Bandra-based visa agent. “Mufiz had set up business in Oman and Dubai where he entered into a partnership with Noora Kaskar’s (Dawood’s brother) son Suhel. He told us that he had a dispute with Suhel following which he came back to India and set up his agency,” said the officer.
According to the officer, often Mufiz would not be able to complete the work given by his clients, from whom he took an advance. “The customers would then ask recovery agents to get their money back from him. He then decided to settle scores with such people. The number displayed on the politicians’ phone would be those of Mufiz’s ‘enemies’,” he said.
Mufiz would call up the politicians either posing as a terrorist or an underworld member. “We have arrested him under Information Technology Act and other sections of the IPC,” he said.
While the officer refused to name the politicians, sources claimed that Gopinath Munde and Sardar Tara Singh were among the politicians whom Mufiz had called.
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