A 36-year-old man who introduced himself as Pankaj Shah, close kin of BJP president Amit Shah, was detained from party office in Lucknow on Tuesday night.

Chaudhary Kuwar Singh, who came to Lucknow to be a legal practitioner, ended up as a conman who hoodwinked over dozen people on the pretext of providing tickets for the upcoming assembly elections in the state.

Chaudhary, a resident of Shravasti district in Uttar Pradesh, duped scores of people including individuals enjoying high-status in the society. A bogus BJP membership Id and Rs 4,55,750 were recovered from the fraudster.

When rigorously questioned, he claimed to be a Congress member for five years in Shravasti and later joined the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha in Bahraich.

Meanwhile, the UP BJP spokesperson Vijay Pathak said, "During Lok Sabha elections, we got an input from our party workers that a man claiming to be Amit Shah's relative was taking money from people on the pretext of providing tickets for contesting election on a BJP seat."

"We waited for months and tried our internal sources to trace him. We asked him to meet us in BJP office, from where we handed him to police," he divulged.

Well placed sources in Lucknow said, "After getting bio-data of workers of various political parties, he used to call individuals and ask them to come with money to Hotel Gomti on Shahnajan road in the state capital, in order to collect the ticket for the upcoming election."

"He charged five to eight lakh rupees per candidate and handed them forged receipt of donation to the party fund," he added.