NEW DELHI: He was a few months short of turning 18 but could weave an unmatched tale of deception and manipulation, brainwashing minor girls into burgling their own homes.
His modus operandi was simple yet effective: fabricate a story about being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, gain the girl’s trust and sympathy and then exploit her for all she was worth.
The teenager’s charm and good looks made him a master manipulator.
On Feb 5, the Nangloi police station in west Delhi received a complaint about a house robbery. “After receiving the complaint, the police team conducted a thorough investigation but found nothing suspicious,” a police officer said. There were no signs of forced entry, no broken locks or damaged doors. And yet, jewels worth Rs 7 lakh were missing from the house.
The cops pored through CCTV footage from the locality but did not find anything suspicious.
Then, as the investigation went deeper, there were suspicions about the 16-year-old daughter of the complainant’s brother.
She was brought in for questioning and after a prolonged interrogation, she finally cracked under the pressure and revealed the boy’s shenanigans.
“The minor girl who lives on the second floor of the same building as the robbed house admitted to stealing the jewellery from her aunt to fund her 17-year-old boyfriend’s medical treatment. She thought that he was going to die if he wasn’t operated on soon,” the officer said.
When the cops investigated these claims and tracked her boyfriend, they realised that the teenaged girl who thought she had found love was actually being deceived.
The boy swept her off her feet with his smooth talk and good looks, but little did she know that their whirlwind romance was built on a foundation of lies.
“Our police team managed to recover the stolen jewellery when he was about to sell it. The boy was found to be fit and fine with no previous medical history of the kind he had lied to the 16-year-old girl about,” said Sachin Sharma, DCP (Outer).
As the police dug deeper, they uncovered the fact that the girl was just one of the boy’s many victims, a pawn in the teenager’s game of deception. “When our police teams conducted a thorough search of the premises and checked his phone, we found several similar chats in which he had told several other minor girls about his made-up diseases,” the officer said. “He had sent them photographs of him in front of a hospital to back his claims. He had made several such requests for money and jewellery.”
A case was registered under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the boy was apprehended and sent to a reformation home. An accomplice who helped him sell the stolen valuables has also been apprehended.
The young con man admitted to police that he tricked girls to support his lavish lifestyle, cops said.
Further investigations are under way and police teams are reaching out to more of his victims to investigate the full scale of his deception.
