A fraudster who kept dodging arrest by changing his identity, his address and his companies has finally been caught by police in Gujarat after a hunt that stretched on for nearly ten months. The accused, picked up from Madhya Pradesh, allegedly built an elaborate web of fake firms to swindle banks and investors out of crores of rupees.
The trail began with Operation Hawkeye
Last year, police in Ahmedabad's Zone-7 launched a dedicated crackdown called Operation Hawkeye to track down fugitives and wanted criminals hiding in the area. Officers from eight police stations pooled their records and began compiling a list of absconders. That exercise turned up 32 fugitives, one of whom was Nilesh Patel. Patel had been shifting his hideouts and identities so frequently that he managed to stay a step ahead of investigators through repeated attempts to nab him.
A tip from Betul cracked the case
After months of dead ends, Ahmedabad police finally received a solid lead that Patel was holed up in the Betul district of Madhya Pradesh. A team was dispatched immediately, and once on the ground, Gujarat police joined forces with the local force for a joint operation. Within a matter of hours, the combined team tracked him down. He was arrested on August 18 and brought back to Ahmedabad, where a lengthy round of interrogation began.
Interrogation exposes a banking fraud pattern
As the questioning progressed, investigators say layer after layer of the scheme came to light. Patel allegedly floated shell companies solely to defraud banks on a large scale. His method involved submitting fabricated quotations for machinery purchases to secure loans, while the collateral properties offered against those loans were often equally fake. In some cases the actual property owners had no idea their documents were being used; in others, the paperwork itself was entirely forged. Vasna police station alone has registered a fraud case against him worth roughly Rs 90 lakh, while three separate cases with the crime branch accuse him of cheating people out of Rs 14 crore.
Nearly 20 shell firms set up in Mumbai
Police say that after going underground, Patel relocated to Mumbai and floated close to 20 companies under the "Torsion" name, shuffling funds between them to keep the operation running. Using these same firms, he reportedly attempted to secure loans worth thousands of crores of rupees from major banks. The investigation further revealed that he had set his sights on India's fast-growing semiconductor industry as his next target.
A fake semiconductor firm and the Semicoin plan
According to police, Patel had also set up a bogus semiconductor company called Torsion Liberal Scientific, through which he planned to launch a digital coin named Semicoin to pull in large sums from investors. Before he could reach out to the public and put that plan into motion, police closed in on his location and brought the entire operation to an end.
