Over 2,000 duped in Mumbai fake vaccine camps,8 arrested

Over 2,000 people have fallen victim to 'fake Covid vaccination camps' in Mumbai, where police have filed seven FIRs and arrested eight people so far, including a woman who shared the username/password of a CoWIN account to generate vaccination certificates. The accused have been charged with attempt to commit culpable homicide not amounting to murder. Mumbai Police said scammed citizens may have been injected with saline, or salt water.

"Eight accused have been arrested and Rs 12.40 lakh that was fraudulently obtained has been recovered. Bank accounts of the main accused - Manish Tripathi and Mahendra Singh - have been frozen," Vishwas Nangre Patil, Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order), said. "We have also discovered eight more camps had been organised by this syndicate, and that most of the accused are common across all these crimes," he added.Mumbai Police have said one of the four arrested last week - a Mahendra Singh - is the mastermind, and another - Sanjay Gupta - helped set up the 'fake vaccination camps'.

Meanwhile the Bombay High Court on Thursday directed both the state and the BMC to file affidavits to state the new policy guidelines to ensure there is no repeat of the fake vaccination camps that occurred in Mumbai's western suburbs recently, in which over 2,000 people were duped. State public prosecutor Deepak Thakare informed the HC that over 2,053 people received fake Covid shots, and 8 persons were arrested so far. Senior civic counsel Anil Sakhare said when people realised that certificates were from three different hospitals in one camp, BMC started questioning the hospitals. The bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Girish Kulkarni instructed BMC to find what was the effect of this "fake vaccine" on people. "Do they have antibodies? Were they given saline or water?" the bench asked and said, "They should be taken care of now."