Posing as the owner of an upmarket hotel, a conman has managed to steal £110,000 worth of diamond jewellery from a store in Mumbai by hypnotising a jewellery shop employee.
Police in Mumbai, India, are on the hunt for an as-yet-unidentified conman who managed to steal £110,000 worth of diamond jewellery after hypnotising a jewellery shop employee.
The alleged incident took place on Saturday morning in a newly opened jewellery shop in the upmarket suburb of Bandra West.
Reports suggest that at some point during that morning a gentleman approached one of the shop workers, a girl named Katrina Sunil Purswami, explained that he was looking for a gift for a friend and asked to view their collection of diamond jewellery.
Claiming that he was the owner of the Royal China hotel – situated just a couple of doors away – he asked Katrina to bring the diamond collection to the hotel for his perusal, promising full payment would then be made for the items he was interested in purchasing.
The jewellery shop owner, swayed by the promise of a big sale, allowed Katrina to take the shop’s collection of diamond necklaces and bracelets to the hotel.
Once she arrived with the goods the gentleman, who coincidentally was reported to have been behaving as if he did indeed own the hotel, asked her to note down details of the items of jewellery in the £110,000 collection. Whilst she was doing this he is alleged to have hypnotised her and made away with the diamond jewellery.
”Purswami was left confused and could not understand what was going on" commented Prakash George, senior police inspector of the Bandra police station to the Daily News and Analysis newspaper.
However, she is said to have reported the incident to local police as soon as she realised what happened.
As of yet the police have been unable to track the conman as, while some CCTV footage has been captured of the accused at the hotel, the security cameras in the jewellery shop were not working at the time of the incident. Consequently it is proving difficult for police to identify and track the suspect.
