A 2022-batch trainee IPS officer of the Chhattisgarh cadre, Rahul Bansal, has come under judicial scrutiny after a complaint alleged he and two police personnel accepted ₹1 crore to settle a cyber fraud case during his first field posting. A Special CBI Court in Delhi has sought an Action Taken Report from both the Chhattisgarh Director General of Police and the CBI Director, a step that puts the state’s own police leadership on record over how the complaint was handled.
Alongside Bansal, the complaint names Assistant Sub-Inspector Praveen Kumar Rathore and constable Anshul Sharma. The complainant has placed digital material before the court, including WhatsApp chats and call recordings, said to be connected to the alleged transaction, though none of the allegations have been independently established at this stage.
A first posting under a cloud
Bansal had worked as an Income Tax inspector before joining the Indian Police Service, and his first field assignment after entering the IPS was as Circle Superintendent of Police in Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district. It was during that posting, according to the complaint, that the alleged bribery arrangement took shape, with ₹1 crore reportedly demanded to settle a registered cyber fraud case.
The complaint alleges the amount was not paid as a single transaction but moved through hawala channels in two instalments of ₹50 lakh each in May 2026. That routing detail, if substantiated, would place the case within a well-documented pattern in Indian financial crime investigations, where informal transfer networks are used specifically to obscure the origin and destination of illicit payments from conventional banking scrutiny.
A recurring vulnerability in cyber fraud policing
Cases of police personnel allegedly accepting money to slow-walk or settle cyber fraud investigations have surfaced with some regularity across India in recent years. In Kerala, four officers were suspended and a Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau probe launched after they allegedly conspired with counterparts from Gujarat to extract ₹6.60 lakh from relatives of accused persons in exchange for settling a cross-state cyber fraud case. In Bengaluru, an Assistant Commissioner of Police and an Assistant Sub-Inspector attached to a dedicated cyber crime station were arrested by Lokayukta police after allegedly demanding ₹4 lakh to investigate a complaint at all.
What distinguishes the Bansal case is both the seniority trajectory involved, a trainee officer barely into his first posting, and the scale of the alleged amount, considerably higher than the sums involved in comparable cases elsewhere. Investigators are expected to examine whether Bansal’s official position and authority over the underlying cyber fraud case were used to facilitate or demand the alleged payment, a question central to establishing whether this was an isolated lapse or part of a more coordinated arrangement involving the two other named personnel.
What the ATR is expected to establish
The Action Taken Report sought by the court is intended to clarify what steps, if any, were taken after the original complaint was received, whether a preliminary inquiry was opened, and how the Chhattisgarh Police and CBI have assessed the material submitted so far. That report is likely to shape whether the case proceeds toward a formal investigation or remains at a preliminary stage pending further verification.
The financial trail, given the alleged use of hawala channels, is expected to form a significant part of any investigation that follows. Establishing the source of the ₹1 crore, the intermediaries who may have facilitated its movement and the eventual beneficiaries would require piecing together financial records alongside the WhatsApp communications and call recordings already placed before the court, a process that in comparable hawala-linked corruption cases has often proved more time-consuming than tracing conventional banking transactions.
For now, the case remains squarely at the allegation stage, with the court’s insistence on a formal accounting from both state police leadership and the CBI marking the first concrete step toward testing whether the claims hold up under investigation. The developments expected in the coming weeks, primarily the content of the ATR itself, will determine whether the matter escalates into a formal corruption investigation or is resolved through internal departmental processes.
