Nagpur: A big scam seems to be thriving at Nagpur Rural Regional Transport Office (RTO) where stolen vehicles were being registered with new engine and chassis numbers, and sold again. The racket spanning India also operated from Nagpur in nexus with agents and some RTO officials, who are now under the scanner, local media reports said.
According to reports, the stolen trucks are mostly registered at Arunachal and Meghalaya RTOs, and then brought to Nagpur RTO to further transfer them with fake documents. Such stolen trucks with fake documents are sold at lower prices in Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh.
The reports further said that sensing some irregularities in the office of Regional Transport Office, Nagpur rural, State Transport Department has sent a team of officials here to investigate the matter. The team is accompanying another group of Mumbai Police (Crime Branch). Though the officials are tight-lipped over the development, the reports revealed that the nexus between RTO officers and agents in Rural office has come to fore.
Highly placed sources told a local daily that Nagpur Rural RTO wing is literally running at the behest of agents. The officers are always surrounded by agents. The computers in the chamber of officers are being handled by the agents. The latest irregularity that was noticed by Mumbai Crime Branch is of writing chassis number of the stolen or assembled trucks.
The modus operendi is, the trucks are stolen, dismantled and assembled by the miscreants. The abandoned vehicles are found and their chassis numbers are given to the stolen or assembled trucks. On the basis of chassis number, the truck is registered in RTO office. These stolen trucks mostly come from Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya etc. These trucks, with new chassis number and fake documents, are then sold.
Common man doesn’t know the truth. But Mumbai Police caught some trucks and checked their authenticity. They were shocked to see that the chassis number was not matching with the vehicle number. Then the team conducted further search operations and found that these trucks were transferred from Nagpur Rural RTO.
According to reports, the agents had transferred several stolen trucks from different states and brought them to Nagpur Rural RTO, where they were registered with fake documents. The Mumbai crime branch sleuths seized two heavy vehicles in March following a tip-off that they were stolen and being used with fake documents created from Arunachal Pradesh RTO. The trucks had been subsequently taken to Nagpur, where the agents helped transfer them with documents prepared in the Rural RTO before being sold to different persons.
The cops had realized the trucks, both purchased through Nagpur-based agents, were not made by the manufacturers mentioned in the documents during investigations with the help of automobile experts, reports added.
