Achieving a major breakthrough in a legacy financial crime investigation, the Ghaziabad branch of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has apprehended a fugitive bank employee who had successfully evaded law enforcement for 15 years. The arrested individual, identified as Poonam, was captured by a specialized surveillance team during a targeted raid in Haryana’s Yamuna Nagar district.
Poonam had been formally declared a proclaimed offender by a special judicial magistrate’s court after being linked to a multi-crore asset misappropriation and loan layering scam orchestrated during the 2010–11 financial window. Following her interception, she was produced before the Special CBI Court in Ghaziabad and subsequently remanded to 14 days of judicial custody at Dasna Jail.
The deep institutional fraud was executed while Poonam was serving as a staff member at the Dewan Public School branch of Punjab & Sind Bank in Meerut, causing a verified direct loss of ₹2,61,58,000 to the public sector lender.
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The Mechanics of the Loan Layering Plot
According to formal charge sheets submitted by federal prosecutors, the fraud was executed through an organized insider network that heavily exploited gaps in the bank’s retail lending procedures. Poonam, operating in deep collusion with the then branch manager, Devendra Pal Singh, and over 50 secondary conspirators, engaged in wide-scale document manipulation.
The syndicate specialized in opening fraudulent savings and credit accounts under entirely fictional or proxy names. Using these phantom profiles, the accused drafted deceptive home loan applications to simulate premium property acquisition.
To satisfy baseline credit appraisals, the members generated completely fabricated title logs, false property valuation reports, and forged sale deeds for non-existent real estate plots. Once processed, the credit approvals were fast-tracked by compromised branch managers, enabling the syndicate to rapidly withdraw the capital via multi-layered check clearances.
Identity Swaps and Long-Term Flight
CBI intelligence units revealed that immediately after the internal financial discrepancy surfaced and formal criminal investigations commenced, Poonam vanished from her known residential clusters in western Uttar Pradesh. To completely drop off the digital surveillance radar, she executed a calculated long-term flight strategy across neighboring states.
The suspect continuously migrated between temporary hideouts, completely altered her structural identification details, and adopted a series of false aliases to blend into regional local communities in Haryana.
Despite prior property attachment proceedings and statutory proclamation decrees issued against her, she remained hidden until field assets intercepted her current location fingerprint in Yamuna Nagar.
Federal prosecutors informed the court that extensive documentary and electronic evidence has been systematically gathered against the broader syndicate. The agency is now processing a formal application to claim temporary police custody of Poonam, aiming to extract details regarding parallel undeclared bank accounts, track down the remaining unrecovered cash balances, and identify any external financial networks that may have bankrolled her 15-year flight from justice.
