WARANGAL: On Friday, Jangaon police apprehended 15 members of a gang involved in a Rs 3.90 crore scam concerning Dharani and Bhu Bharati land registrations in Jangaon and Yadadri districts. Police reported that nine other suspects are currently at large.
According to Warangal police commissioner Sunpreet Singh, the main culprits, Pasunuri Basava Raju and Jella Pandu, operated online service centers in Yadagirigutta. Another suspect, Ganesh Kumar, allegedly linked them to online land registration centers. The gang collected registration fees from farmers via MeeSeva operators and online service centers, falsely promising to pay challans using NRI accounts.
The extorted money was distributed as commissions to the service operators and middlemen, with the remainder going to the prime suspects, police stated.
The authorities seized Rs 63.19 lakh in cash, Rs 1 lakh in bank deposits, property documents worth approximately Rs 1 crore, a car, two laptops, five desktops, and 17 mobile phones.
Singh noted that the accused exploited sporadic technical issues during land registration fee payments. They took advantage of these glitches to manipulate the Dharani and Bhu Bharati portals over recent days.
Basava Raju altered application options on the portals to lower challan amounts, modified challans using mobile applications, and sent fraudulent receipts to farmers. The suspects also tampered with official payment receipts, remitting reduced amounts to the government while submitting forged challans at local MRO and registration offices through middlemen, leading to considerable revenue losses for the state.
Police revealed that the accused had devised a method for earning ‘easy money’ by directly registering Dharani and Bhu Bharati documents through the portals—an action intended for MeeSeva centers, authorized online service providers, or middlemen. They offered commissions between 10% and 30% to participants in this scheme.
The investigation uncovered that the gang executed fraudulent transactions involving 1,080 land registration documents across Jangaon and Yadadri districts.
Sunpreet Singh confirmed that 22 cases have been filed so far, with seven in Jangaon and 15 in Yadadri district. Efforts are ongoing to track and apprehend the fugitives.
