The Ghaziabad Police Commissionerate has dismantled a highly organized inter-state land-grabbing syndicate, arresting 10 individuals—including a retired government revenue official (Lekhpal). The racket specialized in target-mapping high-value, unattended properties, executing intense data-harvesting routines on the legitimate landowners, and deploying elderly lookalike actors to execute fraudulent real estate transactions worth an estimated ₹100 crore.
The enforcement operation has prompted district administration desks to order an immediate high-level integrity audit into historical legacy mutation files across western Uttar Pradesh.
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Targeting the Arthala Village Commercial Estate
The criminal operation unraveled following a formal complaint lodged at the Sahibabad police station by Rajkumar Agarwal, a prominent resident of Noida’s premium Sector-15A. Agarwal approached law enforcement after local village contacts informed him that an unknown syndicate was actively negotiating the unauthorized sale of his highly valuable, vacant ancestral agricultural land parcels located in Arthala village, Ghaziabad.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Trans-Hindon/City) Dhawal Jaiswal formed a specialized tactical team to track the network after the fraud syndicate began pushing fabricated clearance paperwork through regional sub-registrar counters.
The Collusion and Data-Harvesting Playbook
The underlying operational blueprint reveals a deep multi-decade alliance between the conspirators. The gang’s mastermind, 70-year-old Surendra Singh from Hapur, had maintained close ties with retired Lekhpal Satveer Singh (60) for over 20 years. While in service, Satveer identified Agarwal’s prime Arthala plot as completely transferable and sitting vacant, passing the internal revenue coordinates to a real estate broker network managed by an associate, Shashi Gupta, and her partner, Venkate Balkrishna Dhakpade (31).
Once the target plot was isolated, the syndicate executed an exhaustive biographical sweep on the legitimate owner. When cyber units checked the suspects’ seized smartphones, they recovered highly structured data profiles containing:
- Complete family trees of the genuine Agarwal family.
- Exact dates of birth and dates of death of all immediate family members.
- Historical land deeds, old newspaper clippings, and legacy property layouts.
Staging the Paper Trail Across State Borders
To manufacture a parallel, seemingly legal document cache, the group executed an elaborate cross-border scheme. On September 27, 2024, the syndicate filed a fraudulent report with the Delhi Police Crime Branch, falsely claiming the loss of the original property title deeds. To satisfy statutory public notice guidelines, they simultaneously published a missing-document advertisement in a Faridabad-based newspaper.
Using this manufactured loss registry, the group created high-quality forged Aadhaar cards, counterfeit PAN cards, and fake bank passbooks using the real owner’s name but embedding the photograph of an elderly lookalike actor, Ramesh Purohit (68), who was styled to pose as the authentic owner during buyer walkthroughs and video-recorded validation sessions.
Arrests and BNS Forgery Prosecution
The Sahibabad police executed a series of tactical raids just as the gang was in the final process of obtaining certified duplicate copies from the revenue department to close a definitive sale. All 10 suspects—hailing from a distributed network across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra—were taken into custody. The arrested individuals have been identified as:
Surendra Singh (70), Ramesh Purohit (68), Venkate Balkrishna Dhakpade (31), Satveer Singh (retired Lekhpal, 60), Arun Kumar Shivalal (51), Raje Khan (31), Jakir Hussain (38), Sadiq (40), Hanuman Singh (42), and Ali Jafar (32).
Raiding units officially recovered three fake Aadhaar cards, counterfeit PAN profiles, a fake Voter ID, and clone copies of the fraudulent Delhi Crime Branch FIR from their immediate possession. All 10 co-conspirators have been formally booked under strict sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) covering criminal conspiracy, cheating, personation, and the forgery of valuable security. The Ghaziabad district magistrate’s office has placed an absolute administrative freeze on the associated Khasra numbers to permanently block any title mutations or third-party transfers.
