NRI Woman Sold 'Different' Land in Punjab; FIR Registered After 5 Years
NRI Cheated Mohali Land Fraud: An NRI woman alleges she was sold land in Kharar’s Maa Shimla Homes that belonged to someone else; FIR registered five years after her original complaint was closed as a “civil dispute.”
North Desk Correspondent
Mohali, August 3
An FIR has been registered against a Kharar-based builder and a property dealer on allegations of cheating an NRI woman of nearly ₹1 crore in a land deal — five years after she first raised the complaint with police, and only after a second appeal to the Director General of Police’s NRI Wing forced the case to be reopened.
NRI Cheated Mohali Land Fraud: The FIR, registered this week by Punjab Police, names Radhey Soni, owner of Hitech Builder, under Sections 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code. The complainant, Balroop Kaur is a permanent resident of Sector 91, Mohali, currently living in Tanzania.
NRI Cheated Mohali Land Fraud: The Deal That Wasn’t
According to Balroop Kaur’s statement recorded in the FIR, she wanted to invest money in property in India and was introduced to Radhey Soni through a property dealer named Pushpinder Sharma, described in the complaint as a close relative’s contact. Soni and Sharma allegedly showed her four plots — numbers 218, 219, 220 and 221 — in a project called Maa Shimla Homes at Desumajra, Kharar, along with site maps, and quoted a combined price of ₹32 lakh.
On September 11, 2018, the two men allegedly got the plots registered in her name through a General Power of Attorney (GPA), collecting the full ₹32 lakh, and assured her the land was free of any legal complications.
Twelve days earlier, on August 20, 2018, Kaur says she had also signed a construction agreement with Soni for three-storey flats — 12 units in total — to be built on the plots, with payments to be released in instalments as construction progressed. She paid Soni ₹52 lakh via bank transfer on October 1, 2018, to begin the work.
The FIR states that no construction ever took place. Kaur had by then returned abroad, and says Soni kept offering excuses while she remained overseas.
A Different Village Altogether
NRI Cheated Mohali Land Fraud: The complaint’s central allegation surfaced only when Kaur returned to India in March 2021 and visited the sub-registrar’s office to check on her registry. What she found, she says, shocked her: the registered plot was not the one she had been shown in Kharar at all, but land located in a different village — Santi Majra — nowhere near the Maa Shimla Homes site Soni and Sharma had walked her through.
The FIR further states that the actual owner of the plot subsequently approached her — identified as Balbir Singh of Mundi Kharar — and told her the land Soni had registered in her name was in fact his property. Singh reportedly took her to the site to show her the real location of the plot, distinct from where she had been shown flats and maps years earlier.
Kaur’s complaint alleges that Soni and Sharma acted together to cheat her of close to ₹1 crore between the plot cost and the construction advance.
Five Years, Two Complaints, One FIR
NRI Cheated Mohali Land Fraud: Perhaps the more striking element of this case is what happened — or didn’t — after Kaur first flagged it to police. Her original complaint in May 2021 was sent for verification and eventually closed. When she later obtained records through an RTI application under her original complaint’s UID, she says she discovered that the matter had been closed as a “civil dispute.”
The FIR document itself, recounting the sequence of departmental correspondence, notes that during the original inquiry, Radhey Soni was never summoned, no confrontation was arranged, and Balbir Singh — the man now claiming actual ownership of the land — was not part of the investigation at all, despite the documentary evidence Kaur says she had already submitted.
It took a second petition filed in June 2026 for the Punjab NRI Wing to order the complaint reopened. That order, following what the FIR describes as a “speaking order,” directed a fresh probe, which was carried out by the Deputy SP-rank officer of the NRI Wing before the file was forwarded and the FIR finally registered — six years after the alleged fraud began, and roughly five years after Kaur’s first formal complaint to police.
This account is drawn from the FIR as registered, which is based on Kaur’s statement to police; Radhey Soni and Pushpinder Sharma have not yet had an opportunity to respond to these allegations, and neither has commented publicly. North Desk has not independently verified the ownership dispute over the plot.
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