India's Biggest Scam

 India's Biggest Stamp Paper Scam or Scam 2003

Scam 2003's mastermind Abdul Karim Telgi born in Karnataka indulged in India's biggest scam. According to many reports this scam was valued to be of a whopping amount of around 20000 crores or more leaving behind the controversial Harshad Mehta Scam and Vijay Malaya Scam in numbers.

To earn a living Telgi moved to Mumbai where he worked as a travel agent and soon began forging travel documents to illegally send people to Saudi Arabia. But he was soon sent to jail for forging documents. In the jail, he met Ratan Soni who worked in stock market. He taught him in forging stamp paper documents in the jail and in 1994 he started the business of printing fake stamp papers. His network grew immensely in all the Government Departments, Police Department and even he maintained connections with some ministers by bribing all of them. He bought official stamp paper machines from Government's Printing Department by declaring them obsolete through his links and soon used these machines to set his own press. In this way he started printing original stamp papers in an illegal way and defrauded the Indian Government for thousands of crores. He created a deficiency of stamp papers in the market and in this way minted thousands of crores. His network grew in many cities of India and he lured people to join him in selling fake stamps.

His scam was lastly uncovered in 2003 and was put behind the bars. In 2017, he died due to a multiple organic failure but surprisingly in 2018 after his death the Nashik Session court acquitted him in the case in absence of 'solid evidence' against him.