Engineer, associate held for duping job aspirants

The Subramanyapura police arrested two people for allegedly duping hundreds of unemployed youth by promising them jobs with reputed IT firms.

The accused Darshan Sriram, a software engineer, and Shanmuga, a history-sheeter, were arrested from Goudanapalya. The police seized a car, laptops and mobile phones from them. Shanmuga was hired to scare away people, the police said.

Based on several complaints, Annamalai, DCP South, formed a special team to probe the case. The team traced the accused who were on the run.

Darshan and his wife floated an IT firm in 2015 and opened branch offices in Kathriguppe and Kumaraswamy Layout claiming they had tied up with major IT firms for projects on a contract basis. The duo even created fake documents to prove their claims. They opened branch offices in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala and took huge amounts from people on the pretext of security deposits. Many employees realised they had been duped and demanded their deposits back. But Darshan would ask Shanmuga to threaten them.

Darshan, from Tiptur, completed his engineering in 2010. He joined an IT firm where he met his wife Nikhila Godve. After quitting the company in 2012, the duo set up their own firm and began to dupe unemployed youth. The police said the couple has a baby and owing to this they have not arrested Nikhila.

So far, the probe revealed that Darshan had duped people to the tune of ₹2 crore and spent the money on buying a flat, expensive cars and goods. He would often go on holidays to foreign countries with his wife and child, a senior police officer said.