The Railway Protection Force (RPF) in the city has started conducting raids on agents of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) operating in the city and neighbouring regions. The raids come on the back of a series of major breakthroughs in e-ticket touting at a national level.
Sources said that while IRCTC agents mostly used fake identities (IDs), the use of touting software is also being looked at. The RPF in a pan India operation, had recently arrested key figures in the touting racket where the software MAC was being used.
The software has since been eliminated, but railway officials said they wanted to conduct the raids as a way to keep the momentum going. “There is always a possibility of new software being used and with the summer rush coming up, we expect cases of touting, especially with regard to tatkal tickets,” an official said, on condition of anonymity.
The RPF has checked around 200 agents in the city and has caught 19 using fake IDs to book tickets. The drive is expected to go on for the coming month, where RPF staff will be checking the agents’ servers to see anomalies in ticket booking.
The RPF, in multiple nationwide raids, had seized and blocked 27,948 live tickets booked through MAC amounting to ₹7.96 crore and had recovered used tickets to the tune of ₹30 crore. It has also arrested key people in the racket including the owner and financier of MAC software Amin Kagzi, who was arrested in Surat on February 17.
Sources said on Tuesday, the Central Railway RPF had arrested a key person involved in the financing of the racket from Kolkata, who goes by the name of Pinku Dada. Officials said they were in the process of interrogating him to get leads in the financing of the operations.
