The prison authorities have decided to initiate a probe into the fake IPS officer episode inside the Vellore jail where a woman accused posed as a senior IPS officer and took a woman warden, with whom she shared a close relationship, for a ride.
“It is not clear how a woman warden went on to become so close with the fake IPS officer and her relatives started giving money to the fraudulent woman. We need to probe how all this happened,” disclosed a senior jail official on Monday.
The fake official, Sheeba Mathew alias Vijay Bhanu, 36, had reportedly extracted money from the woman warden and some of the accused lodged in prison by claiming to be an IPS officer on special assignment to study irregularities in the prison.
Though the family of one of the woman wardens had lodged the complaint with the police, it looks like Vijay Bhanu had cheated a few other jail officials.
According to jail sources, Vijay Bhanu, imprisoned for a theft case in 2010, had enjoyed a lot of patronage from some jail staff after she claimed to be an IPS official.
Last week, the police had arrested the woman, her uncle and a photographer who had helped her.
She claimed that she was running a trust and collected money from people as investment promising to double the deposit in a year’s time.
She had also told families of a few accused that she would ‘pull some strings here and there’ for their early release and collected huge amounts from them.