A 24-year-old city youth, who had put up in Taj Bengal, was arrested on Tuesday on charges of duping the hotel.

Police said Rohit Das, who used to flaunt five debit and two credit cards, all invalid, had also duped a star hotel in Mumbai, from where he had come to the city on Monday.

After his arrest, some residents of Rohit’s Regent Park neighbourhood told police that the youth had cheated them of sums ranging from Rs 2,000 to Rs 10,000, citing his mother’s illness.

At the Alipore address, the youth had checked into a suite usually reserved for celebrity guests after producing one of the invalid cards.

The hotel authorities refused to comment, but a source said Rohit was allowed a “lean season” discount of 50 per cent on the Rs 50,000-a-day suite tariff.

On Tuesday morning, the hotel management asked Rohit to pay a day’s rent. “He produced his debit and credit cards, none of which was valid. The management then asked him to cough up cash. The youth had no option but to throw up his hands, prompting the management to call the cops,” said an officer of Alipore police station.

Rohit, a hotel management graduate from a private institute, had worked for a few months on the Calcutta helpdesk of a private bank.

After his sister’s marriage and father’s death last year, he left Calcutta for Goa in search of a job. “But Goa was not lucky for him, prompting him to shift base to Pune,” said the officer.

While working in a BPO firm in Pune, Rohit was called for an interview to Mumbai for a deck cleaner’s job with a US-based cruise liner.

“He had booked a room in a star hotel in Mumbai on the Net, quoting his credit card number. He knew it would take some time for the hotel to verify if the card was genuine,” the officer added.

But Rohit did not get the cruise liner job. Realising that he had to return home, Rohit asked the hotel’s travel desk to book a ticket for Calcutta on a low-cost carrier. “After the ticket arrived, I sneaked out with a bag, keeping the rest of my luggage in the hotel room,” the youth reportedly told the police.

“The hotel had paid for the ticket, hoping to realise the money from him in the final bill. The room rent and other charges, too, were not paid. We are yet to know whether he had pulled the same trick in Goa and Pune,” said an officer.

Rohit’s mother Mita, a retired schoolteacher, was not in their Regent Park home.