For eight hours a day over a span of an entire month, at least 28 people from Tamil Nadu were deployed on different platforms of the New Delhi Railway Station to count the arrival and departure of trains and their coaches. Little did they know that they were being duped as part of an elaborate employment scam.
According to a complaint filed with the Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW), the aspirants were fooled into believing that this was part of their training for positions of travel ticket examiner (TTE), traffic assistants and clerks. Each of them even made payments in the range of Rs 2 lakh and Rs 24 lakh to avail jobs in the Indian Railways.
According to the complaint lodged by 78-year-old M Subbusamy, the scam took place between June and July, and it was during this period that the aspirants were collectively duped of Rs 2.67 crore by the group of fraudsters.
Subbusamy, an ex-serviceman, had put the victims in touch with the alleged fraudsters, but he has claimed that he was unaware that the entire thing was a scam and that he too had fallen for their trap.
“Each candidate paid money ranging from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 24 lakh to Subbusamy who further paid these to a person named Vikas Rana. Rana posed as a deputy director in the Northern Railway office in Delhi,” 25-year-old Snethil Kumar, a victim from Madurai, told PTI.
Most of the victims are graduates with backgrounds in engineering and technical education, he said, adding that the training amount varied for various positions such as travel ticket examiners, traffic assistants or clerks, everyone underwent the same training, ie, counting trains at stations.
Speaking to PTI over the phone from his hometown in Virudhunagar district in Tamil Nadu, Subbusamy said, “Since my retirement, I have been helping unemployed youths of our locality to find a suitable job without any monetary interest.”
How the scam worked
In his FIR, Subbusamy has alleged that he met a person named Sivaraman, a resident of Coimbatore, in one of the MP quarters in Delhi. Sivaraman claimed to be very closely associated with MPs and ministers and offered to facilitate employment in the railways in lieu of monetary gains.
Subbusamy further alleged that Sivaraman asked him to come to Delhi along with job seekers. He initially arrived in the capital with three job seekers, but 25 more joined in as news of their job training spread in their villages in and around Madurai.
According to the FIR, after paying the money as facilitation charges, these prospective candidates were called for a medical examination at the Railway Central Hospital, Connaught Place, and then for document verification at the office of the Junior Engineer, Northern Railway, Shankar Market, New Delhi on various dates.
The victims invariably met Rana outside to collect the money but never took them inside any Railway building. According to them, all the documents such as orders for training, identity cards, training completion certificates and appointment letters turned out to be forged when cross-verified with the Railway authorities.
“After document verification, Mr Vikas Rana and Mr Dubey, one of his associates, took all the candidates to Baroda House for issuing study material and kit and also issued them forged/fabricated orders for training, which obviously we realised very late, only sometime back, when we attempted to verify its authenticity,” Subbusamy alleged in the FIR.
(With PTI inputs)