Chennai: Horse race addict fakes theft after pledging wife’s jewels; exposed by WhatsApp chat history
What helped the officials crack the case soon was the WhatsApp chat history that had a message from him to a jewel maker to make duplicates of the jewellery, which exposed his original plan
Cash
CHENNAI: Investigating a complaint that 120 sovereigns of jewellery and Rs 7 lakh cash were missing from a house, the city police found that the man of the house had pawned the gold to gamble on horse races, only to lose the money in betting.
What helped the officials crack the case soon was the WhatsApp chat history that had a message from him to a jewel maker to make duplicates of the jewellery, which exposed his original plan. However, as his wife preferred not to file a police complaint, the Sastri Nagar police let him off after giving him a stern warning.
The man, Mahesh Kumar (name changed), approached the Sastri Nagar police station with a complaint stating that more than 120 sovereigns of jewellery and Rs 7 lakh cash were missing from his home. His wife, a private school teacher, realised that the jewels were missing from the locker and informed him.
The police team that went to his house on Tuesday to investigate the matter initially suspected the role of one of the four domestic helps working for the family. With no signs of any break-in or forced entry into the house, they thought the staff could have stolen the jewels.
"But when one of our officers was going through the husband's phone, he appeared perplexed and was acting strange around the official. On checking his WhatsApp chat history, we found that he had sent photographs of jewels asking for duplicates to be made," said a senior police officer.
The subsequent probe revealed that Mahesh Kumar had pawned his wife's jewels over time with two pawn brokers in T Nagar and Sowcarpet and used the money for betting. As he could not recover the jewels, he tried to replace them with duplicates. But his wife noticed the missing jewels before he could do that and prodded him to file a police complaint, according to the police officer.
As the missing jewels belonged to the wife, the officials asked her if she would like to prefer a police complaint, but the woman refused. The man was let off with a warning.
