Ample room for malpractices :

False documents sold for mere Rs. 5,000 :

Major RMV registration scam exposed

By kurulu Kariyakarawana

The Department of Motor Traffic or popularly known as the Registrar of Motor Vehicles is one of the oldest government departments that is notorious for various fraudulent practices and scams by shady characters in the past. Being one of the busiest offices in town and visited by a large crowd everyday, supported by various unauthorised brokers there is ample room for malpractice. Yet again proving this notion, a major scam of producing false documentation for vehicles was unearthed by the Department hierarchy along with the Colombo Fraud Investigation Bureau last week.

False vehicle information

A mafia of stealing vehicle registration documents from the office and selling it with false vehicle information for different prices has been carried out for over three years and was exposed with the recent detection. A six-member gang led by a woman has produced fraudulent papers for numerous automobiles with forged signatures of Department heads as well as divisional police officers.

It all started with a person lodging a complaint with the Colombo Fraud Bureau a few weeks ago that the vehicle he purchased recently has been sold to him with false documentation. A car bearing the vehicle registration 301 - **** has been sold to him for Rs.1, 450, 000 by a man identified as Aravinda Dissanayake. The Colombo Fraud Investigation Bureau immediately arrests the seller and learns that he was appearing under a false name and his actual name was Mohamed Rafeel.

Rent-a-car

Director Colombo Fraud Investigation Bureau SSP Ananda Alwis

The suspect has been questioned by FIB officials to learn that he had borrowed the car from a rent-a-car service to be returned after use which he had not done. The police then summoned the owner of the car renting service named Gamini Ratnayake and recorded a statement from him.

According to Ratnayake he had rented his car to Aravinda Dissanayake (Mohamed Rafeel) on the understanding of receiving it after a month. The vehicle owner told the police that Aravinda Dissanayake was introduced to him by a woman known as Seedevi Selladurai.

The FIB took the woman into custody and it did not take them long to understand that she was also appearing under a false name.

Her actual name was Najidra Akil alias Rehana, a Muslim national who had pretended to be a Tamil national. The investigators revealed that she had been associating with the rent-a-car owner for sometime by hiring his vehicles.

She had hired a car a couple of months ago and had returned it to the owner within the agreed period. She had then introduced to Aravinda Dissanayake to vehicle owner recommending him to be a trust worthy person to rent out vehicles.

When police questioned at length she revealed that the car was sold to a buyer with forged documents.

False papers

She also revealed that a person attached to the Department of Motor Traffic had helped her by issuing false papers to sell the vehicle belonged to a rent-a-car service to a different person.

With the information sought from her the Colombo Fraud Investigation Bureau arrested the inside man, identified as Gamage Karunaratne. The inside man was soon found to be the official driver of a former Accountant of the Department of Motor Traffic.

Interrogated

When interrogated at length the suspect divulged a series of events that traced down to a major scam in the Department secretly carried out for a long time. Investigations revealed that the suspect had stolen a stack of empty vehicle registration documents that had later been forged and manipulated to create false vehicle ownership papers.

At this point the Colombo Fraud Investigations Bureau sought the cooperation of the Department of Motor Traffic to handle the scam.

An impartial inquiry conducted by the DMT revealed that bundles of empty vehicle registration papers had gone missing in 2011 without the knowledge of any official in charge.

The Department was able to track the lost bundles of papers and its serial numbers. Eleven registration papers starting from the serial number VX0016989 up to VX0017000 and another thousand papers from VX0017001 up to VX0018000 had been stolen by the suspect. He had then used these papers to issue bogus vehicle registration documents by filling the given format of the DMT.

In the actual process the empty clauses of the format has to be printed with a computerised mechanism which no outsider had access to except for authorised personnel of the Department.

But the fraudsters had managed to fill the documents with a substandard printing mechanism.

Sold

It was reported that the arrested driver had sold a forged single documentation for Rs. 5000 to Seedevi Selladurai who had masterminded the scam of reselling the vehicles to others.

The police broke open the locker of driver Karunaratne and found 15 such false vehicle registration books.

Director Colombo Fraud Investigation Bureau SSP Ananda Alwis told the Sunday Observer that three more suspects had been taken into custody who had operated as shady brokers of the vehicle selling business who had aided and abettted the gang.

He also requested the public to be extra vigilant about forged documents especially when they purchase a used or second hand vehicle from an unknown party.

The detection was conducted by Colombo Fraud Bureau Unit 2 Inspectors H E Upul and M Hassan with Sergeant Kuruppu (1154) and Constable Wimalasena (74943) under the instructions of SSP Ananda Alwis and OIC FIB Chief Inspector Priyanka Wijenayake.