Express News Service
KOCHI: For all their literacy and digital acumen, people of Kerala are also gullible. At least that is what recent incidents of Keralites falling easy prey to ponzi schemes show. Their mad rush for easy money made Keralites easy targets of new-age investment fraudsters like Ebin Varghese and Praveen Rana, who made them invest in shares and debt schemes after promising unbelievably high rates of returns.
Ebin, a 40-year-old former executive of a leading private insurance company in Kochi, and his wife Sreeranjini duped around 85 investors to the tune of over Rs 100 crore by encouraging people to invest in a stock market scheme offered by his firm Masters Group. The investors, comprising NRIs, doctors and even senior officers who retired from PSUs, received returns initially. Then the flow of money stopped.
Ebin confessed to spending the money on gambling and living an extravagant life. The investigators said the couple spent a whopping Rs 50 crore in casinos in Goa.
Meanwhile, Rana, the chairman and MD of Safe and Strong Marketing Consultancy in Thrissur, duped nearly Rs 150 crore from investors by offering interest rates as high as 48%. Though he escaped from his flat in Kaloor, Kochi, on January 6 minutes before the police arrived, Rana was arrested from Coimbatore on Wednesday.
Will the investors get their money back? In Ebin’s case, the police said the funds were pumped into other business, not into trading. “An…
