Six held by Mumbai police for stealing data from job sites, conning applicants

A Noida-based fake job racket was busted on Saturday, unravelling a con that offered hundreds of people jobs in reputed companies such as HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, and then bled them of money under the guise of various fees. The Mumbai followed the trail to the satellite city while investigating a complaint filed at Cuffe Parade Police station.

Six persons — Devrushi Sharma, Vikrant Giri, Jaydeep Shastri, Shashank Dubey, Sonal Rana and Manoj Tiwari — were arrested by Cuffe Parade police on Saturday. Rana is a former employee of the employment website Monster.com. She and Tiwari would allegedly steal the data job seekers submitted to the website and to Shine.com, and sell it to Dubey.

"Dubey, the mastermind of the racket, runs a fraudulent company called All India Networking Faculty Icon Pvt Ltd in Sector 23, Noida," says Inspector Raja Bidkar of Cuffe Parade Police station.

"He and his associates would pay Tiwari and Rana Rs 25,000 for the data," Bidkar added.

The employees of the call centre in Noida would call job seekers and "match" them with roles in reputed companies as per their skills. They would even set up "interviews" for the applicants with member of their team posing to be interviewers and send them forged appointment letters from ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and so on to gain their trust," says Bidkar.

Once their trust was won, they would tell the interviewee (s)he'd got the job and give them a bank account number to deposit a registration fee. "Thereafter, they'd ask for interview fees, online interview fees, selection letter fee, fees for bond paper, training purposes and for document verification, and other fake services," says Senior Police Inspector Rashmi Jadhav

The police were tipped off by a complaint filed im Cuffe Parade police station in October 2017, by a woman who was told she had got a job in HDFC bank and was made to deposit Rs 1.21 lakh in various bank accounts.

"At least over 100 victims from Gujarat, Rajashthan, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur have surfaced in our probe so far," said Pravin Padwal, Additional Commissioner of Police, South-Region, "Analysis of the hard disk and computers will help us ascertain the number of victims. The total money generated by the fraud has not been established yet. The gang has been operating for three to four years," said DCP Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone 01, Abhishek Trimukhe