BHUBANESWAR: The Odisha crime branch of police on Saturday arrested an engineer, the mastermind of a job scam, from Uttar Pradesh for allegedly duping more than 50,000 job aspirants of over Rs 15 crore in various parts of the country.
The economic offences wing (EOW) of crime branch nabbed Zafar Ahmed (25) from Aligarh after tracking him for a long time. Ahmed and his team were operating from Uttar Pradesh and they cheated job aspirants from several states, including Odisha, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat.
Sources said the scam was executed by a group of highly tech-savvy engineers with the help of some website developers. The core group of fraudsters was assisted by about 50 call centre employees, mostly from Jamalpur and Aligarh. They were reportedly paid Rs 15,000 per month.
According to EOW officers, the accused were using more than 1,000 fake SIM cards and 530 mobile phones to cheat the job aspirants. In an attempt to hoodwink the police, they contacted the job aspirants only on WhatsApp voice calls.
The fraudsters had saved their mobile phone numbers using the names of fake schemes to take the job aspirants into confidence if they tried to verify the contact details on Truecaller app.
They had opened about 100 mule bank accounts and were withdrawing the cheated money only through Jan Seva Kendras (JSKs) by using the quick response codes. The accused persons were withdrawing huge cash from JSKs by paying 10 per cent commission.
IG of EOW Jai Narayan Pankaj said the scamsters had developed websites which resembled government portals. They uploaded advertisements of government jobs to lure aspirants looking for employment opportunities in health or skill departments. They used some schemes of the Central government to deceive the job aspirants, he said.
The investigating agency has detected some fake websites developed by the team to dupe the job aspirants. The web portals are 'Jeevan Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (www.jssy.in), Bharatiya Jana Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (www.bjsry.in), Gramin Samaj Manav Swasthya Seva (www.gsmsss.in), among others.
The fraudsters used to publish advertisements in local newspapers by using fake identities and made payments for advertisements through mule bank accounts to avoid getting caught by the police.
They were charging Rs 3,000 to Rs 50,000 from the job aspirants on the pretext of registration, interview and training purposes. The fraud amount could be much more than Rs 15 crore and investigation is continuing to unearth more details about the scam, Pankaj added.
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