'Gold worth nearly Rs25 mn stolen from locker of Karachi bank’

KARACHI: A citizen on Wednesday claimed that his two kilograms of gold worth nearly Rs25 million has been stolen from the locker of a bank in the DHA area of Karachi, ARY NEWS reported.

The police have launched an investigation into the incident and shared that a citizen claimed to have kept two kilograms of gold in the locker of a bank in the Khayaban-e-Shahbaz area of the DHA.

“He kept the gold of his entire family in the locker,” they said, adding that the citizen lodged a complaint that when he checked the locker today, he found out nothing except a black shopping bag.

The police said that they have begun a probe and initially the locker will be scrutinized for any fingerprints. “A case will be registered and the investigation department will begin a probe into the matter,” they said.

This is not the first time that incidents of material kept inside the lockers being stolen are reported and recently, staffers of a bank secretly replaced gold assets of citizens with ‘fake gold’ in the lockers.

The audit of the private bank’s branch in the Gulistan-e-Johar area of Karachi unveiled the fraud where the original gold assets of citizens to acquire loans were replaced with ‘fake gold’ by the bank staffers.

After the discovery, the management conducted the audit of one more suspected branch located in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal area that further exposed the plan of the defrauders.

It emerged that the bank staffers at Gulistan-e-Johar acquired a loan worth Rs24 million by giving gold assets as a guarantee for a fake customer. Alongside acquiring the loan, the staffers had secretly replaced the original gold with the fake one.

The bank management later found fake precious metal worth Rs550 million from the lockers of its Gulistan-e-Johar branch. The gold stocks were reportedly placed inside the lockers by the citizens to acquire loans. It was learnt that the bank staff had changed original gold with fake gold from more than 150 bags.

In the Gulshan-e-Iqbal branch of the same bank, the management detected fake customers who had been awarded loans worth millions.

The scams have led the bank management to file two separate cases at Shah Faisal and Aziz Bhatti police stations in which the bank staffers were nominated in the financial scams.