Man dupes 300 Western Railway job hopefuls of Rs 21 cr, nabbed

Mumbai, Feb 6 (IANS) A man, who promised railways jobs and thugged over 300 persons of around Rs 21 crore, has been nabbed by the Western Railway (WR) Vigilance Department, officials said here.

Following a tip-off, the vigilance sleuths lay watch and detected the fake jobs racket going on for more than three months, with likely further ramifications.

WR Chief Spokesperson Sumit Thakur said the vigilance team laid a trap to nab the suspect with help from an outsider and two ‘proxy candidates’ seeking rail jobs.

An amount of Rs 20,000 was also transferred as part payment to the fraudster’s account through Gpay, as part of the trap to call him for a meeting at Mumbai Central Station to collect the balance amount.

As expected, the suspect came to the designated location at 2 p.m. on Friday and was caught when he came to take the remaining amount against a job.

The WR vigilance probe has revealed that the accused -- whose identity has not been disclosed -- had allegedly collected Rs 9-10 lakh per candidate, and used to make forged documents with the assistance of a Kolkata-based associate.

Thakur said that a total of 180 blocked numbers were found in the smartphone of the accused, probably belonging to the victims who had paid him huge amounts to get a lucrative railway job.

The investigation also detected about 120 chats of the duped victims demanding their money back, ranging from Rs 5-8 lakh, which were paid to him for the jobs.

All the fake documents, chats and videos of recruited staff have been recovered and further investigations are into the scam in which more than 300 job aspirants were duped of an estimated amount of over Rs 21 crore.

The accused was handed over to the Government Railway Police at Mumbai Central and booked under various sections of IPC, said Thakur.