On Wednesday, a resident of Karachi alleged that two kg of gold worth roughly Rs25 million had been taken from a bank’s vault in the DHA neighbourhood.
An inquiry into the matter has been opened by the police, who have revealed that a citizen has claimed to have hidden two kilos of gold in a bank locker in the Khayaban-e-Shahbaz neighbourhood of the DHA.
They said, “He kept the gold of his entire family in the locker,” and the citizen complained that when he examined the locker today, all he discovered was a black shopping bag.
The locker will initially be examined for any fingerprints, according to the police, who claimed they had started an investigation. “ A case will be registered and the investigation department will begin a probe into the matter,” they said.
This is not the first time that stuff stored in lockers has been alleged to have been stolen, and lately, bank employees replaced residents’ gold assets in the lockers with “fake gold.”
The audit of the private bank branch in Karachi’s Gulistan-e-Johar neighbourhood exposed the scam, in which bank employees substituted “fake gold” for customers’ genuine gold assets when they applied for loans.
Following the revelation, the management audited a second suspicious branch in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighbourhood, which further revealed the fraudsters’ scheme.
By using gold assets as a guarantee for a fictitious client, bank employees at Gulistan-e-Johar were able to obtain a loan for Rs 24 million, it has come to light. Alongside acquiring the loan, the staffers had secretly replaced the original gold with the fake one.
Later, phoney copies of gold jewllery worth Rs550 million was discovered by the bank’s management in the lockers of its Gulistan-e-Johar branch. The residents allegedly put the gold stocks inside the lockers to obtain loans. It was discovered that the bank employees had replaced the real gold with counterfeit gold taken from more than 150 bags.
The management of the same bank discovered phoney clients who had received loans totalling millions in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal branch.
The bank administration filed two separate charges at Shah Faisal and Aziz Bhatti police stations alleging that bank employees were involved in financial fraud as a result of the schemes.
