Patna: Police have arrested a fraudster who duped a COVID-19 patient admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)-Patna posing as a doctor.
The suspect, Jay Prakash, described by the police as an ayurvedic practitioner, had duped the victim’s family of Rs40,900 (Dh2,000) on the pretext of providing expensive drugs for the patient Lal Babu Gupta. The victim succumbed to the virus later.
The arrest of the fraudster followed a directive from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in New Delhi where the victim’s 17-year-old daughter Sakshi Gupta had registered a formal complaint over phone to show what the situation is at a premier health facility like the AIIMS.
Acting on the complaint, a team of police reached Prakash’s clinic in Patna on Friday evening posing as patients and nabbed him the moment he came to his chamber to treat them. “The arrested man holds a bachelor of ayurvedic medicine and surgery and works at a private hospital. We are interrogating him for more details,” a senior police official Ganesh Kumar told the media on Saturday.
According to the complainant, her family came into contact with the man through local contacts as they had no permission to go inside the hospital to meet the patient. She said the man won their confidence by sending them photographs of the patient lying on his hospital bed in a very critical condition and in dire need of medicines to survive, through WhatsApp chats. The patient had been admitted to AIIMS in July last year when coronavirus cases were at their peak.
“He (the fraudster) told us over phone that the patient was being taken care of by his former batch-mate at Fortis Delhi Dr Harshvardhan and his condition was serious. He asked us to pay Rs40,900 to purchase some medicines from outside since they are not available at the hospital. Considering the patient’s condition, we paid the money to his account but soon realised we have been cheated,” complainant Sakshi Gupta said.
Subsequently, she called up the PMO and complained to the officials about how there was a severe drug crisis at AIIMS as the patients were being told to buy medicines from outside. The PMO conducted an inquiry at its own level and advised the complaint to register a case with the local police. Through a mail sent to the complaint, she was also communicated by the PMO that the fraudster had got information about the patient through AIIMS’s senior resident Dr Amit Kumar. Eventually, she registered a complaint with the local Phulwarisharif police station on January 24 leading to his arrest.
“Anxious families have been seeking information about the patients’ condition through hospital staffs. It will be inhumane if we deny such requests. It looks like someone misused this information,” AIIMS’s superintendent Dr CM Singh told the local media.
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