Impostor ran extortion racket for 12 years, held

LUCKNOW: The Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (UPSTF) on Monday arrested an impostor from Jharkhand who ran an extortion racket in several states.
The STF said that the accused, Ranjan Kumar Mishra has been duping government officers, engineers and project managers in MP, UP, Delhi, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam and Kerala since 2008. He had also posed as the then chief minister of Jharkhand and extorted Rs 40 lakh from another political leader.An FIR was lodged in the case at Ranchi district.
Mishra got on a spree of making extortion demands by posing as different officials and extorted as much as Rs 50 crore in a span of 12 years. He has over 50 cases of fraud registered against him.
He also forced four Members of Legislative Assembly in Madhya Pradesh to shell out large amounts by posing self as the state’s governor. An FIR is lodged in Sagar district in the case. Police said that Mishra was also lodged in Tihar jail for duping a government contractor in Delhi to the tune of Rs 5 lakh in 2018.
STF tracked Mishra after a case got registered for extorting Rs 10 lakh from a project manager of UP Rajkiya Nirman Nigam, Rajmani in January this year. The miscreant had also posed as a chief justice and demanded Rs 10 lakh from the director of Judicial Training and Research Institute (JTRI) in Lucknow. The police commissioner of Lucknow sought an STF probe in the case.
UP inspector general of police, STF, Amitabh Yash said that Mishra was adept in negotiating with officials. Seven cases of fraud have been registered against him in UP alone.
“While Mishra was lodged in jail in Patna in 2011, he called the then SDM Mankapur in Gonda posing self as divisional commissioner and demanded Rs 50,000. Likewise, he called SDM Bilsi in the same year for Rs 50,000 and SDM in Etawah for the same amount,” said the IG.
The IG said that during probe it surfaced that Mishra had many aides in different states in whose accounts he used to get the money transferred.
The STF is tracing his aides in other states and said that they had arrested two aides — Sunit Gautam and Ganesh Tiwari — on March 20.