On Thursday, in Gautam Buddha Nagar, police arrested four more people concerning their ongoing investigation into a multi-crore GST fraud case, bringing the total number of arrests to 29. They have recovered 54 SIM cards, 41 forged stamps, 18 forged Aadhaar cards, 16 forged PAN cards, and 20 bank cheque books, among other items.

The four who were arrested were identified as Rahul Nigam (29) and Piyush Kumar Gupta (36) of Shahdara in Delhi, Dilip Sharma (29) from Indralok and Rakesh Kumar (47) of Pitampura. Police said Piyush completed his MBA from DU.

According to the authorities, a Mumbai-based businessman was overseeing the offshoot of the prominent gang, which had established 250 fictitious companies with forged PAN and Aadhaar numbers. Shell firms were established as part of the scheme using fictitious PAN and Aadhaar numbers. After registering for GST numbers, these businesses exploited them to create fictitious invoices for items and services that were never provided. Due to the accused’s ability to claim the government’s Input Tax Credit (ITC), revenue was lost.

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This instance demonstrates the increasing risk of GST fraud in India. Experts have cautioned that the GST system is susceptible to these scams due to its complexity and ineffective enforcement tools. To address these problems, the government has implemented more stringent restrictions and increased the use of technology to monitor suspicious conduct. To stop these kinds of scams from happening, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Some firms were shown to be dealing in exporting and importing goods with companies based in Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines.

Chander claimed that the “B team” produced fictitious invoices for Rs 70–80 lakh daily. “The four accused were booked under sections 420 (cheating), 467, 468 and 471 (all related to forgery) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC,” he stated.

According to the police, the extent of the GST fraud will become more apparent as the inquiry goes on. “We have seized Rs 4,000 crore that were purported to be tax credits by presenting phoney invoices and registering fictitious businesses.