BIKE BOT SCAM

 

One more scam story is now making headlines in all Indian newspapers, but this time it is not any capitalist, and unlike the USA, it is also not a banking scam, but this is a biking scam.

You may be thinking that how on earth can someone do a biking scam? Lets know that,

Introduction to the scam - 

The scam was done by a resident of UP named Sanjay Bhati, a criminal mastermind who designed a scam to raise money from several small investors for bikes and then giving them some prodigious returns. Still, later they and the whole nation came to know that actually it was a scam worth around 15000 crore rupees.

This whacking amount of money was raised by Sanjay Bhati because he was just trying to make some money very fast, and for that, he launched a scheme called - 'BIKE BOT - THE BIKE TAXI POWERED BY GIPL'.

Starting of the scam - 

So at first, Sanjay started a real estate business with his family in the area of Greater Noida in the year 2010, but that business was able to make only a negligible amount of money. Now Sanjay was looking for some way to make quick money, so he came up with the ‘BikeBot’ scheme in the year 2017. The scheme was that investors will have to pay for a bike that would be used as a motorbike taxi, and they would earn some staggering returns on that investment money.

All the investors were asked to pay Rs 62,100 to buy one bike. An EMI of Rs 5,175 per month was decided, and the rental was fixed at Rs 4,590 per bike per month. The company promised a provocative return amount of 1.17 lakh per annum to every investor if they invested 62k in buying a motorcycle. Investors were given the freedom to invest in as many bikes as they can.

He tried different ways to earn the trust of investors and make them pay the money, like he signed an agreement with them that the money they were investing was totally safe and the money would not go anywhere. Other than that, he also said that the scheme is soon going to end so people should invest as early as they can. All these finally led to the scam where Sanjay was only able to make money in a short time but not for too long.

End of the scam - 

But when the investors didn't receive any kind of return, they approached the police to file a complaint against Bhati. You may get shocked to know the number of investors, and there were a total of 2 lakh investors in this ‘BikeBot’ scam. CBI took charge of this case, and they said that the Noida district authority and police authority had an idea about the fraud, but no action was taken against the company. The ED has also reported that the company was planning to create a bigger scam by introducing e-bikes in place of petrol bikes, stating the problem with the registration of petrol bikes as a reason. The subscription cost of e-bikes would have been double that of petrol bikes. 

Image source: Google Images