The Railway Protection Force (RPF) unearthed an illegal ticketing scam in the Railways, which it says is linked to a terror financing racket.
RPF Director-General Arun Kumar said on Tuesday that the scam came to light with the arrest of Ghulam Mustafa, 28, a software analyst from Jharkhand. He was arrested in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, around 10 days ago.
“We have seized two encrypted laptops from Mustafa, which indicate an organised crime racket. Hamid Ashraf, the person who developed the software to illegally book tickets by forging Aadhaar and PAN cards, is wanted by the CBI in a July, 2019 case of bomb blast near a school in Gonda, Uttar Pradesh,” Mr. Kumar said.
An Indian software company, which has branches across the country and abroad, has also come under the scanner for having links to the racket, Mr. Kumar said, without naming it. He, however, said the company was involved in a money laundering case in Singapore.
Mr. Kumar said a team of programmers were working for Mustafa, who is one of the members of the multi-layered racket.
He allegedly started out as a tout in Bengaluru and graduated to e-tickets and illegal software, an RPF officer said.
“For the last 10 days, the IB, the Special Bureau, the ED, the NIA, the Karnataka police have interrogated Mustafa. Dimensions of money laundering, terror financing and diversion of funds through crypto-currency are suspected,” Mr. Kumar said.
He said Mustafa allegedly had 563 personal IRCTC user IDs, and a list of 2,400 SBI branches and 600 regional rural banks where he was suspected to have accounts. “Mustafa’s phone has many Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle-Eastern, Indonesian and Nepali numbers as well as six virtual numbers. There was also an application to create fake Aadhaar cards.”
Mr. Kumar said an analysis of his laptops revealed that he was a follower of a Pakistan-based religious group. Mustafa’s digital footprints were found on government websites, he said.
Ashraf, the mastermind of the racket, is suspected to have generated ₹10 crore-₹15 crore a month through the illegal procedure, and is suspected to be in Dubai.
“The first aim of these organised rackets is to generate cash. Once that money is amassed, they turn towards terror financing. All the information gathered from them has indicated a link to terror financing and money laundering… Ashraf is suspected to have a technical team to maintain the cloud-hosted servers. He has 18-20 lead sellers or super admins in India, who handle the money and send to Ashraf through various hawala accounts and crypto-currency,” Mr. Kumar said.
Then there are around 200-300 panel sellers who buy the software panel from lead developers and forward it to agents. “One panel is a set of 20 IDs bought with ₹28,000 per month. They forward the IDs and software to agents. Roughly 20,000 agents are there in India who use the illegal software for booking. About ₹10 crore-₹15 crore in black money is generated a month in cash. The illegal software, ANMS, bypasses IRCTC’s log-in captcha, booking captcha and bank OTP to generate tickets. For a genuine user, the booking process usually takes 2.55 minutes, but for the software it takes 1.48 minutes...,” Mr. Kumar said.
The Director-General said the software also facilitated simultaneous log-in through several user IDs with pre-filled data, thus helping to corner most of the confirmed tickets. The agencies are also looking for a suspect code-named “Guru ji.” “Guru ji is higher up in the order and a technical expert. He uses VPN [virtual private network]. He received around ₹13 lakh from Mustafa recently through bank transfers involving 71 transactions,” he said.
