Officers from the Railway Protection Force (RPF) on Friday night arrested a man in Tiruppur on charges of developing two fraudulent mobile applications for tatkal ticket booking and swindling money to the tune of ₹ 20 lakh.
RPF sources said on Saturday that S. Yuvarajaa (32), a native of Pothiyapalayam village panchayat in Kangeyam Block, allegedly amassed the money between 2016 and 2020.
He developed an application called ‘Super Tatkal’ in January 2016 and another one named ‘Super Tatkal Pro’ in March 2019 to get confirmed tatkal e-tickets. The application demanded money from customers in the form of prepaid ‘coins pack’ (10 ‘coins’ worth ₹ 20), and for each booking, five ‘coins’ were deducted.
With nearly one lakh users having downloaded these applications, Yuvarajaa directed the money through a payment gateway to his bank account, and swindled around ₹ 20 lakh in four years, the sources said.
The accused Yuvarajaa did his M.Tech at Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur, and was based in Bengaluru where he developed the two applications. Upon announcement of the COVID-19 lockdown, he returned to his hometown in Kangeyam in March.
His online activities were recently detected by the RPF Intelligence Officials of Tiruppur along with the RPF Cyber Cell at Southern Railway Headquarters, Chennai. The RPF Cyber Cell collected digital evidences such as the accused’s location, source codes of the server and application, end-users list and bank statements, the sources said.
Yuvarajaa was booked under Section 143(2) (Penalty for unauthorised carrying on of business of procuring and supplying of railway tickets) of the Railways Act and and remanded in judicial custody on Saturday.
The two illegal applications were subsequently deactivated, the RPF sources noted.
