The Hindu : White-collar offences on the rise

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jan 18, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Andhra Pradesh-Hyderabad

White-collar offences on the rise

By MARRI RAMU

OF LATE, a new style of cheating is reported in various parts of the twin cities. Some of the mushrooming manpower consultancies are accused of deceiving the youth with false promises of providing them white-collar jobs.

While complaints galore about fake placement agencies, the police are in a helpless position to prevent this type of fraud due to various reasons. Unlike property offences, the police are unable to recover the cash collected from the jobless in this type of cases.

The modus operandi of such offenders is simple. As no clear-cut guidelines are laid down, any Tom, Dick and Harry can open a placement agency. It may be surprising that owners of some placement agencies are intermediate dropouts.

The case of Mallipeddi Babu Rao, who was arrested by the Commissioner's Task Force sleuths recently, is a classic example. After discontinuing his intermediate course, Rao worked as a free lancer for some job consultants for a few years. Three years ago, he opened a consultancy in Secunderabad and issued advertisements in leading dailies offering jobs in blue-chip companies.

When some youth approached him, Rao was able to convince them that he was in the good books of the managements of some reputed firms. He collected Rs. 100 per head as registration fee from them. He used to call up the residences of the applicants claiming himself to be a company's representative and conduct telephonic interviews.

When the pleased applicants meet him, he used to extract money ranging from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 1.5 lakh from them by issuing fake appointment orders. Thus, he collected nearly Rs. 30 lakhs. His victims included qualified professionals. In another case, an engineering graduate gave advertisements in a newspaper without even setting up an office.

The Begumpet police, who went to Dilsukhnagar searching for the office address mentioned in the advertisement, were shocked to find a `To-let' board on the building. Investigations revealed the accused, Satish Kumar Reddy, hatched a plan to collect money from the applicants and disappear. He conducted preliminary interviews at a reputed club to impress the job seekers.

These two are not isolated cases. In the backdrop of acute unemployment problem, fake job consultancies have become money-spinning machines for several cheats. The absence of a system to monitor operations of such agencies only aggravated the situation.

The lack of data relating to private job consultants with any of the Government wings is making it difficult for the police to crackdown on job racketeers unless a specific complaint is made.

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White-collar offences on the rise