A woman with MBA degree and her accomplice, an insurance consultant, who allegedly duped the unemployed of Rs.55 lakh offering jobs in reputed IBM company, were arrested by the Crime Investigation Department on Friday.
While K. Srilakshmi, 34, and G. Anand, 37, both from Visakhapatnam, were caught, their associates, R. Nagasrinivas, Ch. Kiran, Rishi Reddy and Praveen, are absconding. The gang used to access curricula vitae of job seekers by approaching different job consultants in the State, including Hyderabad.
They would call up the job aspirants asking if they were interested in taking up job in IBM. “Naturally, the job seekers would jump at such opportunity. In this case too, the victims readily agreed getting ready to pay money,” the CID Cyber Crime Inspector, B. Ravi Kumar Reddy, said.
Members of the gang would create a new email id of the job seekers in the latter's names and mail the details to them. A few days later, the accused would send a fake offer letter in the name of IBM Company to that email id. They would call the victim and tell him that the IBM's job offer was sent directly to the new email id.
“To lead the victim believe it was genuine offer, the name of IBM's Asia head, Rangarajan, was used in the job offer mail,” the investigators said. At this stage they would ask the unemployed persons to pay them Rs.1.5 lakh towards processing fee. Some of the victims were called to Pune and taken to a building with IBM logo hunt outside. The kingpin, Kiran, used to run a manpower consultancy christened ‘Jobmerchants' in Visakhapatnam.
He hired the arrested persons to work for his consultancy. In one such case, the gang accessed bio-data of a person from SVS Consultants in Dilsukhnagar and contacted him over phone. Investigation revealed the gang had taken for ride 37 persons in this manner and relieved them of Rs.55 lakh between June and September in 2011.