New Delhi: For over a decade, Ashutosh Pandit lived as invisibly as a ghost.After allegedly orchestrating a Rs 17-crore fraud against Indian Overseas Bank in Pune in 2013, the director of House of Laptops, a private company, vanished into the ether.By the time CBI took over the case from the economic offences wing of Mumbai Police, the trail had gone cold. In April 2018, a court officially declared the Pune resident a proclaimed offender.Pandit’s sudden disappearance was a masterclass in pulling off a Houdiniesque act. Seeking refuge in sun-and-surf-drenched Goa, he shed his past like a second skin. To his neighbours in a quiet locality of Bambolim, he was not a fraudster. He was Yatin Sharma, a law-abiding citizen.The transformation was thorough. Pandit successfully procured PAN and Aadhaar cards under his alias, effectively creating a paper trail for a man who didn’t exist. He even managed to obtain a passport from New Delhi, and when that expired, he confidently applied for and received a fresh one from Goa passport office.For 12 years, the forged documents served as an impenetrable shield, allowing Pandit to build a new life, even as the legal machinery in Pune remained stalled. In reality, though, CBI’s pursuit of him never ceased. The breakthrough came not from a physical tip-off, but through the digital dragnet of NATGRID (national intelligence grid) portal.This integrated intel framework began flagging subtle inconsistencies in data patterns. When investigators cross-referenced technical evidence with the inputs generated by the grid, Yatin Sharma’s facade began to crumble, and his digital footprints led them straight to Bambolim. The final act of this cat-and-mouse game was a clinical, coordinated raid. CBI officers, backed by foolproof technical surveillance and armed with years of investigative findings, recently converged on his residence. The man who spent 12 years believing he had managed to outsmart the system was caught off guard. Despite his new identity and address, the agency finally had their man.Pandit’s arrest brings a long-overdue sense of closure to a case that began in 2013 and seemed to have hit a dead end. “This serves as a reminder that in the modern era of integrated intelligence, every ‘perfect escape’ has an expiry date,” a senior officer of the agency said.
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