Mumbai: Call up corporate houses and residential societies offering to arrange vaccination camps, assure them of having access to available stocks of Covid vaccine doses, produce vials with ‘Covishield’ printed on them, forbid photography at the camps citing “government rules”, collect cash payments, and exit the scene assuring recipients that vaccination certificates will be sent to their mobile numbers within a few days.
This is how a network of people allegedly conned at least 2,685 people across Mumbai and Thane in ten fake vaccination camps elaborately organised between 25 May and 6 June, according to the Mumbai Police. Some who got vaccinated at these camps did end up getting their vaccination certificates later, but with names of different hospitals and wrong dates, the police said.
As the demand for Covid vaccines has gone up in the country, so has reports of alleged fake vaccination camps. After last week’s reports of fake vaccination camps in Kolkata, now complaints are coming in of fraudsters operating in Mumbai and Thane. But while the fake IAS officer who organised the camps in Kolkata did not charge money for the shots, the camps held in Mumbai and Thane were not free. According to complaints received till date, the recipients were charged Rs 1,000 or more per dose here.
It is unclear as of now if people at these camps were given actual Covid vaccine doses, or what was administered if it was not one of the three approved vaccines. As yet, however, there have been no reports of any health issues or any side effects after taking the shots.
The Mumbai Police have so far registered cases in connection with nine such ‘fake’ vaccination camps, largely involving the same group of people, and made 12 arrests. The Thane Police has registered one such case.
Deputy Commissioner, Mumbai Police, Vishal Thakur told ThePrint: “We are following leads on more such camps. Investigation is on to check whether the participants in these vaccination camps were administered actual vaccine doses or something else. The investigation is headed in the right direction.”
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Cash payments, no certificates
In May, the head of human resources at RenewBuy, an online issuance platform, got a call from a person named Seema Ahuja, who allegedly claimed that she and her colleagues could organise a Covid vaccination camp for RenewBuy’s employees, channel partners and their families. According to an FIR filed with the Thane police, Ahuja allegedly said they would charge Rs 1,000 per dose.
The FIR dated 25 June, which ThePrint has accessed, mentions that Ahuja had said Mahendra Singh, a functionary of the Malad Medical Association, would arrange for the vaccine doses and also assured the RenewBuy employee that Singh had been organising such camps across Mumbai and Thane. The company accepted the offer and a vaccination camp was arranged at their Thane office on 26 May, between 10 am and 1 pm. At least 116 people were vaccinated at the camp, and the recipients were asked to produce their Aadhaar cards.
In the FIR, complainant Urnav Hiralal Dutta, who works as a cluster sales manager at RenewBuy, said Ahuja came with three persons on the day of the camp and they were introduced to him as “Shrikant Mane, Qarim (supposedly a compounder), and Sanjay Gupta”. The FIR doesn’t mention Mane and Gupta’s role, only their involvement in the scam.
“Shrikant Mane showed me a medicine bottle that had ‘Covishield’ written on it. After that 116 people received their doses between 10 am and 1 pm…When some employees started clicking photos while getting their shots, Seema Ahuja and Shrikant Mane told them photography was not permitted. But some employees went ahead anyway,” Dutta, who manages RenewBuy’s operations in Mumbai, including the company’s offices in Thane and Vashi, said in the FIR.
After the drive, Dutta said, when he offered Ahuja a cheque for Rs 1.16 lakh for the 116 doses administered, she insisted on cash payment and gave a hand-signed receipt. She also said the vaccine certificates will be received on the beneficiaries’ mobile phones or email IDs within eight days, the FIR said.
The very next day, Mane got a request for another camp in Parel at the Podar Centre. According to another FIR filed at Mumbai’s Bhoiwada police station and accessed by ThePrint, a construction contractor with links to both RenewBuy and Podar said he had been vaccinated at RenewBuy’s camp and referred Mane to Shankar Kesare, an assistant purchase manager at Podar Centre.
In the FIR dated 23 June, Kesare stated that he immediately contacted Mane, who allegedly informed him that Mahendra Singh, their head, can arrange for a vaccination camp for Kesare’s office through Shivam Hospital in Dahisar. He asked for Rs 1,200 per vaccine dose, according to the FIR.
The modus operandi was similar.
On the day of the vaccination, on 28 and 29 May, three persons came dressed as doctors, accompanied with Ahuja and Mane. Mahendra Singh too was present and showed Kesare a medicine bottle with ‘Covishield’ written on it, the FIR said. After the drive, the Podar Centre made a cash payment of Rs 2,44,800 and got a handwritten receipt. Again, all 207 recipients were assured that their vaccination certificates would come within eight days.
The certificates eventually arrived only after 12 June, and mentioned different dates of vaccinations. The vaccination venues were recorded as Nanavati Hospital and Lifeline Medicare.
In his FIR, Kesare said “Shrikant Mane assured me that the date on which the data is uploaded on CoWin is reflected as the date of vaccination, and since they had a tie up with five different hospitals, the name of any one could be reflected on the certificate”.
Meanwhile, RenewBuy got vaccination certificates for just four of the 112 people who had been vaccinated at its camp. The certificates reflected the date of vaccination as 6 June and 11 June and the place of vaccination as Nanavati Hospital and Lifeline Medicare Hospital. The other 108 certificates are yet to come.
Singh, Mane, Qarim, Gupta and Ahuja are among the 12 who have already been arrested in the case.
A Thane police officer investigating the case said: “Mahendra Singh seems to be the main person behind the scam, while the others were just used as pawns. But, since the custody of the accused is with the Mumbai Police, we cannot say anything more at this point.”
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Series of ‘fake’ camps
Police have received complaints of more such ‘fake’ camps.
On 17 June, the Kandivali-based Hiranandani Heritage Residents Welfare Association complained to the police about a supposed bogus vaccination drive organised at their housing complex on 30 May. As many as 390 residents had been vaccinated at the camp and were charged Rs 1,260 for a single dose.
Residents of the housing complex said they had no side effects of the vaccine and did not receive their vaccination certificates for days. The few certificates that finally arrived had the names of hospitals such as Nanavati, Lifeline Medicare and the NESCO Covid care centre mentioned as venue of vaccination.
Though the camp at Hiranandani was held at a later date than those at RenewBuy and Podar Centre, the housing society was the first to complain. Their’s became the first of the ten FIRs, and the Mumbai Police arrested Singh and the other three by 18 June.
As investigations progressed, the trail of evidence led the police to file more FIRs, for more such camps organised by the same set of people.
At one camp in Versova, the accused administered ‘vaccination doses’ to 151 people associated with music company Tips Industries and production firm Matchbox Pictures. In another camp organised for Tips at Khar, 206 others were vaccinated. The accused also organised two camps at Borivali for 225 employees of Aditya College and their families, 514 staff members of private firm Mansi Shares and Stock, and one in Malad for 40 employees of the Bank of Baroda.
On Wednesday, the Mumbai Police filed two more FIRs for suspected bogus vaccination camps at Kandivali East and Amboli. In the first camp, 618 people from four different companies had been vaccinated. The accused had said the drive was being done in association with Shivam Hospital.
In the second camp, 218 people were vaccinated, with the main accused, Rajesh Pandey, claiming that the drive had a tie up with the Kokilaben Ambani Hospital. Pandey was a marketing executive at the Kokilaben Ambani Hospital. The hospital terminated his services after his name cropped up in multiple such vaccination drives.
According to reports, Pandey was arrested Thursday morning, taking the total number of arrests in the case to 12.
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The ‘kingpins’
The Mumbai Police has named Singh and one Dr Manish Tripathi, who surrendered to the police Tuesday, as the chief accused in the case. The police had been on the lookout for Tripathi since investigations revealed his possible links to the scam. He surrendered after his anticipatory bail plea was rejected. According to a statement issued by the police last week, both their bank accounts have been frozen.
Singh had been working in the administrative wing of the Malad Medical Association for 17 years, but left the agency about two months ago, a senior functionary of the association told ThePrint.
“He hails from a small town in Uttar Pradesh and is very hardworking. We would assign him work and he would get it done, though his means were questionable at times,” the functionary said.
He added that Singh had a talent for using his network of contacts to get work done. His engagements, however, were not restricted to the association’s work.
“We had warned him about this, because he would go out as a representative of Malad Medical Association (for work unrelated to the association). Then a couple of months later, there was a similar incident and he left the association. I had heard that he was involved in organising vaccination drives, but never suspected it would be a scam,” said the association employee.
Tripathi operates a nursing institute, KCEP Private Limited, which he founded in September 2020, and is said to have used some of his students to transport and administer the vaccines. According to a Mumbai Police officer, Tripathi was previously known to Singh and had rented the ground floor premises of Shivam Hospitals, from where the vaccine vials are suspected to have come.
The BMC had authorised Shivam Hospital as a private centre to administer Covid vaccinations till 28 April. The Mumbai Police last week arrested Shivraj and Nita Pataria, both doctors and owners of the Shivam Hospital, for possible involvement in the scam and facilitating the supply of bogus vaccine doses.
DCP Thakur said: “We are investigating the involvement of Singh, Dr. Tripathi, as well as the Patarias in getting the vaccine vials.”
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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