NE NEWS SERVICE
CHENNAI, MARCH 7
M Mohammed Rafiq, of MKB Nagar in Chennai using his mimicry skills as his asset to conning people, finally landed in jail. He has literally been giving voice to his dreams by conning people with his mimicry skill. The 50-year-old small-time hotelier from M K B Nagar, who successfully cheated victims by mimicking ministers S P Velumani and Sellur K Raju and former Union minister Pon Radhakrishnan in 2014 and 2017, ran out of luck on Friday as he tried to imitate fisheries minister D Jayakumar over phone and attempted to dupe a city-based businessman.
Rafiq landed in police net after Duraisamy, managing director of a private firm in Guindy, approached police over a suspicious call from minister Jayakumar’s office demanding Rs. 80,000 for celebrating former chief minister J Jayalalithaa’s birth anniversary.
According to police, Duraisamy received repeated calls to his office on Tuesday claiming that minister Jayakumar wanted to talk to him. Since he was not in office, his staff took the caller’s mobile number. When the businessman called back, the man on the other end introduced himself as the minister, and asked him to ‘donate’ Rs. 80,000 for Jayalalithaa’s birth anniversary celebration.
After much haggling, Duraisamy agreed to pay Rs 30,000. The caller gave him a bank account number to transfer the money. Since the account was in the name of Mohammad Rafiq, Duraisamy got suspicious and called up the minister’s office only to find that the ‘minister’ who had asked for donation was an imposter.
Duraisamy lodged a complaint and a Guindy police team nabbed the caller with the help of his mobile number.
Interrogation of the accused, who runs a fast food hotel in M K B Nagar, revealed that he had indulged in more than 15 such cases, and had been detained twice under the Goondas Act. In 2014, Gandhipuram police in Coimbatore had arrested him for using minister S P Velumani’s name. In October 2017, he was arrested again for mimicking former union minister Pon Radhakrishnan’ voice and conning a businessman in Anna Nagar of 20 lakh by promising to give him a coal mining contract in Chennai Port. He took the sum in person introducing himself as PA to Pon Radhakrishnan.
Rafiq, who was also arrested in Madurai for mimicking Minister Sellur Raju, has pending cases in Nagapattinam, Virudhunagar and Vellore. Guindy police have now booked him on charges of impersonation and extortion and he was remanded in judicial custody after produced before a court in Chennai.
