A 24-year-old woman, identified as M Sowmya, was arrested by the Avadi City Police for embezzling Rs52.24 lakh over the span of two years while working as a cashier at a fertility hospital in Anna Nagar. Sowmya, a native of Tiruvarur district, was accused of diverting patient payments to her own bank account instead of the hospital’s official account.
The scam came to light following an internal audit, which uncovered that Sowmya had been instructing patients to pay their fees through a QR code linked to her personal account rather than the hospital’s official account. She also failed to record these transactions in the hospital’s billing register, enabling her to pocket the funds.
The case was filed based on a complaint from Dr B Mythili, a 47-year-old fertility doctor who has been running the hospital for the past nine years. In May 2024, hospital management grew suspicious of irregularities after reviewing patient records. They found discrepancies where several patients had not been entered into the system, prompting a thorough investigation.
Further investigation revealed that Sowmya had been embezzling money since February 2022, just one year after she joined the hospital. According to the police, she frequently told patients that the hospital’s bank QR code was malfunctioning, and when patients didn’t have cash on hand, she gave them her personal bank QR code to make payments directly to her account.
The Avadi police’s Central Crime Branch arrested Sowmya on Tuesday, and she was later presented before a magistrate, who remanded her to judicial custody.