The Indian Penal Code, 1860

§416 — Cheating by personation

A person is said to “cheat by personation” if he cheats by pretending to be some other person, or by knowingly substituting one person for or another, or representing that he or any other person is a person other than he or such other person really is. Explanation.—The offence is committed whether the individual personated is a real or imaginary person. Illustrations (a) A cheats by pretending to be a certain rich banker of the same name. A cheats by personation. (b) A cheats by pretending to be B, a person who is deceased. A cheats by personation.

Old law ⇄ new law

Mergedold law ⇄ new law

Old lawIPC §416Cheating by personation New lawBNS §318Cheating

IPC §416 → BNS §318 per the official NCRB Sankalan table. BNS §318 consolidates multiple IPC sections. Marked "(Change)" — substance modified; compare texts.

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Source & version

Official text: India Code (official) ↗

Official India Code text: The Indian Penal Code, 1860 (45 of 1860), English PDF (A1860-45.pdf) retrieved via Internet Archive Wayback Machine snapshot 2020-04-21 of indiacode.nic.in (portal unreachable from ingest network). Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser on 2026-07-15. Repealed by BNS 2023 w.e.f. 2024-07-01. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Eleven State-inserted sections that had been published as central law were removed on 2026-08-02 after the D-052 guard identified them: 354E, 376F, 509A and 509B (Chhattisgarh Act 25 of 2015), 379A and 379B (Gujarat Act 6 of 2019) and 382B-382F (Tripura Act 4 of 2019). They are now recorded as State amendments against the sections they attach to, not as sections of the Code (D-053).

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