Trust breached, elderly couple duped - Aide used debit card to swindle employers out of Rs 20 lakh

Many elderly people who stay alone in the city are avoiding trips to banks amid the pandemic as a precaution against Covid-19 and also to avoid the hassle of standing in a queue in the sun for long durations. : Shutterstock

Snehal Sengupta   |   TT   |   Salt Lake   |    23.12.20  :  A woman who had been hired to assist an elderly couple living by themselves in Salt Lake, especially to help them with their banking transactions during the pandemic, allegedly siphoned off more than Rs 20 lakh from their bank account.

The woman has been arrested.

Benoyendra Kumar Das, 83, and his wife live alone in their CJ Block house in Salt Lake. The couple’s son lives in the US and their daughter is married to an army officer who is posted in Kashmir.

The couple’s children hired Ritajaa Thakur, a resident of New Alipore, to assist their parents.

Das said they completely depended on the woman in her early 30s to carry out banking transactions on their behalf and also pay household bills.

Das has retired from the International Labour Organisation and been running an NGO that promotes safe practices in mines across the country. He said he had also entrusted Thakur to run back-office operations of the NGO from their house.

“In July, she took my debit card on the pretext of paying our landline bill. She also took my cell phone, whose number is linked to multiple bank accounts, and activated Internet banking without my knowledge,” Das told The Telegraph.

Subsequently, she is said to have withdrawn cash and used Das’s card at different establishments and spent around Rs 20.8 lakh.

Many elderly people who stay alone in the city are avoiding trips to banks amid the pandemic as a precaution against Covid-19 and also to avoid the hassle of standing in a queue in the sun for long durations.

Many who live alone are seeking assistance from the police through the Saanjbati and Pronam outreach programmes for the elderly run by the Bidhannagar commissionerate and Calcutta police, respectively. There are still a number of elderly people who depend on domestic help and others to carry out banking transactions on their behalf.

Das, however, was only alerted on December 6, when a bank employee called him up and asked why he was making such withdrawals. He then alerted his daughter, who got her husband to request one of his friends from the National Defence Academy to help them out.

Shantanu Ghosh, who recently retired from the army as a colonel, visited Das’s house and got in touch with the bank. “It was clear from the banking records that someone else had been making these bank transactions. We then contacted the police and filed a complaint,” said Ghosh.

The complaint led to the arrest of Thakur.

An officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate said she had used the money to book a car, go on multiple outstation trips, buy expensive perfumes and cosmetics as well as dresses. Thakur has been charged under various sections of the IPC, including 420 (cheating) and 406 (criminal breach of trust).

She was produced in a court in Salt Lake on Tuesday and was remanded in police custody for four days, Lawyer Soumyajit Raha, who appeared for Das, sub-mitted in the court that Thakur had deceived an elderly couple “to fund her flashy lifestyle”.

“The couple require regular medical treatment and have been duped by a woman they trusted,” Raha said.