The Mumbai Police Crime Branch has arrested four people who would allegedly cheat job seekers into paying large amounts of money by promising them well-paying jobs abroad.
According to inquiries so far, the accused have cheated 14 to 15 job seekers from various States, including Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, of around ₹50 lakh, officers said.
According to Crime Branch officials, inquiries were initiated into the racket earlier this month after a Mumbai resident registered a complaint with the Kandivali police. The complainant, who has worked in the Middle East in the past, was facing financial issues and wanted to work abroad again. He saw a Facebook page called International Jobs and Free Recruitment and left his contact details on the page, after which he was contacted by the accused in August.
The accused added the complainant to a WhatsApp group created using an overseas SIM card, where details of other applicants who had supposedly got well-paying jobs in the U.S., United Arab Emirates and Canada were posted. “From August to October, various people called the complainant and made him pay a total of ₹1.58 lakh through online banking under various pretexts, telling him that he would soon get a good job in Canada. When the complainant asked the accused about the job, they started threatening him, after which he registered a complaint,” a Crime Branch officer said.
The Crime Branch Unit XI, which was conducting parallel inquiries into the matter, tracked the IP address of the Facebook page and the cellular locations of the phone numbers used by the accused. It picked up Ajay Gupta (23), a Bengaluru native who frequently visits Mumbai, on October 14.
The police said Mr. Gupta’s interrogation led them to Cedric Robert (23), Vignesh K.C. (22) and Sneha Panchariya (23), all residents of Bengaluru. They were picked up on Wednesday morning and are being brought to Mumbai.
“All four are graduates and started running the racket around a year ago for easy money. Mr. Gupta has four to five girlfriends in Mumbai, on whom he used to splurge the proceeds of the crime. He met Ms. Panchariya, who was earlier working as a bar girl, in Bengaluru and recruited her, while the other two are his friends,” the officer said.
