Mumbai Police Arrest Suspect in Rs 70 Lakh Gold Jeweller VPP Fraud

Daya Shankar Sharma knew the courier business better than the jewellers he was about to rob. As proprietor of New Bright Air 1 Logistic, the 39-year-old had spent years moving other people's parcels before turning that institutional knowledge against them. Mumbai police arrested Sharma in connection with a fraud that exploited the Value Payable Post system to strip multiple merchants of gold consignments worth approximately Rs 70 lakh, with victims stretching from Zaveri Bazaar to Nalasopara and Sheikh Menon Street.

The VPP mechanism is built on a simple premise: payment is collected before a parcel is released, giving sellers a structural safeguard over open credit. What Sharma allegedly grasped is that the system's integrity depends entirely on the courier's honesty. Working alongside Avdhesh, also known as Avinash Goldy, a Uttar Pradesh-based jeweller who remains at large, Sharma ran what investigators describe as a methodical confidence scheme. The pair completed smaller transactions cleanly, built reputations as reliable counterparties, then scaled to larger consignments and stopped paying.

The specific losses named in complaints are significant. Shrikanth Mitai Paul, a 46-year-old jewellery artisan from Nalasopara, dispatched 714.500 grams of gold ornaments through New Bright Air 1 Logistic on a VPP agreement on March 8, 2025. Sharma had personally vouched for Goldy and encouraged Paul to use his own firm for the shipment. When the parcel was delivered, Goldy returned only 357.850 grams of pure gold; the remaining 322.150 grams, valued at over Rs 31.57 lakh, never came back. In a separate complaint, Pratik Pawan Kumar Parmar, a jeweller on Sheikh Menon Street, handed over 217 grams of gold ornaments worth Rs 18 lakh and received neither gold nor settled payment in return. Across multiple cases now registered at LT Marg Police Station, the pattern holds: partial returns, bounced cheques, and a logistics operator who controlled which parcels moved and when.

The fraud required an insider. No VPP label or government postal guarantee protects a shipment when the person arranging the delivery is the architect of the scheme. That structural flaw is worth naming clearly, particularly for small sellers who rely on informal trust networks in India's tightly knit gold trade.

For merchants shipping precious metals, the Sharma case outlines where standard safeguards break down. Sellers should never use a courier firm introduced by the buyer as the payment collector; the roles of shipper, courier, and payment agent must be held by separate, independently verified parties. Insured logistics documentation should designate a third-party payment handler with no commercial relationship to the recipient. Every consignment should be video-documented during packing, with tamper-evident seals photographed before dispatch. Buyer identity verification, including KYC documents, should be conducted independently of the logistics provider and kept on file before any shipment leaves the workshop. For high-value gold consignments specifically, VPP through a courier firm controlled by the counterparty is not a safeguard; it is the vulnerability.

Three FIRs are active at LT Marg Police Station, with police converting earlier inquiries to formal cases as written complaints accumulate. Goldy remains at large, with police teams conducting raids. The LT Marg jurisdiction covers Zaveri Bazaar, where hundreds of crores in bullion and fabricated jewellery move monthly. Sharma's arrest did not dismantle the fraud's underlying logic; it named it. That is a start.