Gang dupes people with magical rice-pulling machine, makes Rs 1.5 crore

On April 10, Cyberabad Police of Telangana busted a gang that allegedly duped people by offering them a ‘rice-pulling machine with magic powers’ and made ₹1.5 crore. The Special Operations Team (SOT) acted on a tip-off and with the help of Chandanagar police arrested three men involved in the scam. 

Police arrested a 28-year-old farmer named S Chandrahas Reddy, a 43-year-old mobile phone shop owner named P Buchaiah Goud, and a 26-year-old car driver named K Ramesh from different places on the same day, a leading daily reported.

The officials seized two copper pots that the gang marketed as tools for ‘rice-pulling’ that they claimed to be made of ‘magic’ metal. Apart from this, different parts of TV set were also found by the authorities.  

Sometime in last year, the gang duped a realtor in Chandanagar by luring him to invest ₹25 lakh on the marketing of ‘magic rice-pulling’ machine. The realtor was told that the copper pots were made from a precious metal having atomic power and worth crores in the international market, the joint commissioner of Cyberabad police, Shahnawaz Qasim said.

Furthermore, to convince their victims that the pots were indeed magical, the gang used to put the pots next to a wall that had a small hole connected to TV, a mother board, and a TV picture tube placed in the adjacent room. Once the pots were put on the wires that the victim could not detect, an electromagnetic field was created to pull rice and pulses. This successfully convinced the victims that the pots had magical power.   

In past few years, the gang successfully tricked people to invest a huge amount of money in the marketing of this rice-pulling machine and earned almost ₹1.5 crore. At present they have been sent to judicial custody.  

• Cyberabad police
• Magical rice-pulling machine