Kathmandu, January 21:

A group of three persons outsmarted Sanjay Kumar Jha, a staffer of the Hulas Remittance, in front of the Teku branch of the Everest Bank this afternoon and decamped with Rs 1,911,856. Jha had withdrawn the money from the branch.

“As I came out of the bank, three persons told me there was a black

spot on my pant. First I put the money bag inside the car and looked to check where the black spot was. When I looked at the car, the money bag was gone,” Jha told police.

Some hours ago, the same group had tried to cheat Kamalshova Mahrajan, a staffer of the Kalimati Furniture, in front of the bank. “When they told me there was a spot on my back, I just ignored them, thinking they were teasing me,” she told police over phone when she came to know about the theft. A police officer at the Metropolitan Police Circle Kalimati said the group might have been around the bank’s branch from the morning.

Police suspect this is the group that is involved in stealing cash from customers on the premises of valley-based banks in recent days. “We have photographs of the thieves. We are searching them,” SP at the Metropolitan Police Range, Kathmandu, Sarbendra Khanal, told this daily. Applying a similar technique, a group had stolen Rs 5 lakh from Banshiram Parikh, cashier of TM Dugar, at the counter of the Bank of Kathmandu in Kamaladi on January 13.