The Road Transport Authority officials in Anantapur unearthed a major scam in which a gang worked like a well-oiled machine and cheated several people, stole their cars and hoodwinked the Andhra Pradesh Transport Department to avoid paying lifetime road tax running into lakhs.
Deputy Transport Commissioner N. Sivaram Prasad said they chanced upon two vehicles that were re-registered using old registration numbers that had gone out of the state, taking no-objection certificates. “They utilised a loophole in the software of the department, where if a vehicle owner obtains an NoC, the entire data related to that particular vehicle number vanishes from the active screen/database of the RTA officers,” Mr. Prasad said.
Some unscrupulous persons bought cars (five Innova 2.5 G and Innova Crysta 2.8 V) on automobile finance without investing any amount and did not pay it back, telling them that the cars were stolen and lodged a police complaint too to hoodwink them. Those vehicles were brought to Tadipatri in Anantapur district and in likely connivance (yet to be established) of RTA officials, found out the numbers of vehicles that had gone out of the State taking NoCs and had only registration certificates.
Three data entry provisions given as part of customer convenience on APRTA Citizens’ Portal for uploading PDF version of paper RCs, of old vehicles coming from other states, conversion of those in transport category to non-transport category and entering data for all non-migrated vehicles by the owners before validating the facts with their thumb impression, were misused.
They entered scanned copies of fake RC, gave original engine and chassis numbers and since there was no physical check by the RTA officials, new vehicles got registered on old certificates and were sold to people here for a throwaway price. The vehicles, which cost about ₹25 lakh, were sold for ₹13.5 lakh and ₹15 lakh and overzealous customers lapped them up without looking at the papers or bought them, knowing fully well that they were stolen vehicles.
Six such vehicles were confiscated by the DTC Anantapur and RTO Anantapur DSM Varaprasad along with their team after verifying the facts of old number retrieving data from the back-end servers. Some vehicles were still running in Telangana and Karnataka with the old number.
Out of the six vehicles, one was confiscated from Kalyandurg in the district, one in Owk in Kurnool district, Four in Tadipatri bearing numbers — AP39EL5688; AP39ES6399; AP39EM1359 (Maruti Dezire); APEX1566; AP39EM8199; and AP39ET 1566 (rest of the five were Innovas).
