“Realtor used ‘hypnosis’ for cheating”

Anoth­er one of these news arti­cles about the crimes com­mit­ted alleged­ly using hypnosis.

Indi­an Express

Cheat­ing senior cit­i­zens by pre­tend­ing to be an acquain­tance and resort­ing to hyp­no­tism before mak­ing off with their mon­ey was his sig­na­ture style of oper­a­tion for six-sev­en years. Luck, how­ev­er, ran out for Sonu Malik when he was final­ly arrest­ed by a Del­hi Police team, formed espe­cial­ly to track him down, on Wednesday.

Begin­ning every con­ver­sa­tion with “Tau­ji Ram Ram”, he would engage them in ban­ter, seek their bless­ings and gift them elec­tron­ic equip­ment to dis­tract them. Soon the vic­tim would begin to feel drowsy and lose con­scious­ness, wak­ing up lat­er to find his cash and/or jew­ellery miss­ing, the police said.

The Tri­bune

Rakesh Johri, an insur­ance offi­cial, told The Tri­bune that Rahul approached him in Decem­ber last year and claimed he knew him. “He was aware about my back­ground and said he had become rich due to my bless­ings. He said he had brought me a gift and I don’t know what hap­pened after I opened it. I removed my gold rings and gave to him. I was hyp­no­tised. I learnt I was cheat­ed only after 20 to 25 min­utes,” he said.

Com­men­tary: Judg­ing from the actu­al oper­a­tion described here, I agree with Bri­an David Phillips in that it appears that some type of drug was used as opposed to an actu­al induc­tion. The sto­ry does­n’t men­tion any­thing in the line of shar­ing drinks but it seems like­ly giv­en the soci­ety; a sug­gest­ed alter­na­tive was some type of aerosol spray. Still, the media, espe­cial­ly in non-West­ern soci­eties, seem to have a fas­ci­na­tion with crimes uti­liz­ing hypnosis.

The crim­i­nal was appar­ent­ly very good at his crimes: he was active for at least 6 years and amassed quite a for­tune doing so, and it took a spe­cial­ly-formed police unit to track him down and cap­ture him. His crimes were deemed so heinous that he is being charged under a spe­cial law designed to pros­e­cute dan­ger­ous criminals.

Adden­da: I have not been able to dis­cov­er what “Tau­ji Ram Ram” trans­lates to but from the con­text I believe it is a respect­ful greet­ing or bless­ing. It is appar­ent­ly not some kind of mys­ti­cal chant or spell, however.

2 comments to “Realtor used ‘hypnosis’ for cheating”

  • Liu SI Guang

    With all respect for Occam’s Razor, I find it like­ly that a more mun­dane approach was used.
    Giv­en the com­mon­al­i­ties in the reports:
    1. Gifts were giv­en — and pre­sum­ably handled.
    2. The tar­get was engaged in con­ver­sa­tion for a peri­od of time.
    a pos­si­ble sce­nario that meets both points might be  that a seda­tive or mild nar­cot­ic was mixed with a solu­tion that will pass through the skin (DMSO, for example). 
    At the point where the drug engaged, the per­pe­tra­tor would ask for jew­el­ry and the tar­get would comply.
    Sev­er­al years ago there was a some­what sim­i­lar set of events which might be relat­ed to hyp­no­sis that took place in Moscow. There, gyp­sies would engage some­one in con­ver­sa­tion. At some point they would ask for money…and often peo­ple would com­ply — and were not sure why they did when ques­tioned lat­er. In some cas­es, if they did not have enough mon­ey, they would take the gyp­sy to an ATM and make a withdrawal.
    LSG
     

  • It’s cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble that hyp­no­sis was used, and cer­tain­ly some per­sua­sion skills to estab­lish rap­port, but there are also plen­ty of drugs in the Ayurvedic para­ma­copia (Datu­ra immei­date­ly comes to mind) that are sup­posed have the effect of dis­ori­ent­ing and gain­ing com­pli­ance of the vic­tims. Datu­ra was used to shang­hai civil­ians into naval ser­vice in India, as well as for rob­bery. I’m not sure how it’s admin­is­tered, prob­a­bly in drinks, but I’ve also read about a South Amer­i­can vari­ant that is made into a pow­der and blown into the vic­tim’s face. I read an inter­view with a vic­tim who said they were con­scious, but felt com­pelled to com­ply with thi­er rob­bers anyway.