Jaipur: At 56, a city doctor was living the quiet life, firm in the belief that his finances were orderly, predictable and clean. Then he opened his credit-rating report and discovered traces of a secret life that he had no idea of.At first, the entries and numbers made no sense. One unknown loan entry, then another, then dozens more: personal loans, business loans, housing loans and even gold loans – all ostensibly in his name but without his having any knowledge of them whatsoever. By the time he had finished scrolling down the list of entries, the total loan amount shown pending against his name had ballooned to nearly Rs 4 crore. In all, there were 36 separate borrowings spread across several banks and finance companies, all taken in his name and without him having applied for any.On March 27, when the doctor lodged an FIR at the city’s Gandhi Nagar police station, what first appeared to be a clerical error nightmarish proportions had hardened into something much colder: a carefully orchestrated case of identity theft.Police say an unknown individual or individuals appear to have used the doctor’s PAN credentials to unlock credit across multiple financial institutions, exploiting verification systems with enough precision to avoid immediate suspicion.The detail that unsettled investigators the most was not the amount of money fraudulently obtained, but the discipline behind the crime.Every EMI was being paid on time; there were no defaults, no recovery calls, no legal notices – in fact, there were no red flags of any kind to have brought this massive fraud to the unsuspecting doctor’s notice. Whoever had built this shadow profile understood the system well.As long as repayments continued, the ecosystem was unruffled – the victim unaware, the banks unalarmed. The false identity was alive until the doctor decided to review his credit history.At first, police examining his financial records found that several customer identification details attached to different suspect loans did not match the doctor’s actual personal information. That deepened suspicion that this was not a paperwork mix-up but deliberate impersonation.The loans had been sourced from multiple banks and NBFCs, suggesting elaborate planning, coordination and repeated success in breaching multiple verification channels.Investigators are now tracing where the money went and who benefited from it. Notices were sent Monday to the banks concerned, seeking account records and documentation tied to 36 separate loans. Officers are now painstakingly trying to reconstruct the path of each loan application, approval, disbursal and repayment.There is one possibility behind the story that has investigators most curious: the accused may be someone with the same name as the doctor.Police suspect that such a person may have obtained the victim’s PAN details and leveraged the overlap in identity to fabricate a believable but fake financial profile.“The PAN card used to take out the loans has the doctor’s number. Our initial probe suggests most EMIs have been paid regularly,” Gandhi Nagar SHO Bhajan Lal told TOI. “While his identity might have been taken over, the doctor has not lost any money so far,” he added.Investigators are also examining whether a fake CIBIL account was created to intercept communications and keep alerts away from the doctor against whose name the debt had been accumulated. If that is proved, the case is no longer one of just financial fraud but of organised cyber crime.For months, perhaps longer, someone inhabited the doctor’s financial identity with enough care to keep it stable, profitable, and, most importantly, undetectable.Now, records are being pulled apart, one loan at a time, in search of the person who borrowed a stranger’s name and turned it into a fraudulent line of credit worth crores.
