CHENNAI: The Kanchee-puram police have busted a job racket with the arrest of a 51-year-old man from Kerala and two of his ‘employees’ at Vandalur on charges of cheating nearly 400 fresh graduates by promising them jobs in IT companies and collecting Rs 5,000 from each one of them.
Police said the kingpin of the racket A Naagas had ‘recruited’ the 400 from northern districts of the State in the last 25 days after conducting interviews. After the victims got wind of the racket as they neither got the job nor the money back, they turned violent and ransacked his ‘office’ at Vandalur and the ‘training centre’ at Urapakkam. Around 200 of them, including 50 girls, gathered at the Otteri police station in the night and lodged a complaint. “We have taken rooms on rent and been staying here for last one month, with great hardship. But Naagas was dodging us every time when we asked for the offer letter or salary,” said one of the cheated persons.
He had collected about Rs 5,000 from each one of them, saying it was required for their pre-job training. Also, he asked the graduates to wait for a couple of months before he could start paying them salaries.
To a few graduates, he had promised to get jobs in IT companies in Chennai after the training; to some of them he promised that he would recruit them for his company Alive InfoTech which, he said, he had just started. “He recruited 50 graduates last month. As more youngsters started enrolling, he started demanding as much as Rs 50,000 from job aspirants,” said inspector Nagalingam.
The graduates, most of whom had just passed out of the college, grew suspicious as there was no other activity in the “tech company” other than interviewing people and collecting fee.
When questioned by police, Naagas had told them he was merely running a job consultancy firm and collected the fees for training. However, police found that he had posed as if he was running an IT company, but he was keen only on collecting the money.
Police also arrested two of his staff Manimegalai (31) and Arul Dass (30).