Mastermind behind country’s biggest job racket arrested in Odisha

LUCKNOW:  The Odisha Police held one Zafar Ahmad, the alleged mastermind of one of the country’s biggest job frauds, in Aligarh on Sunday. The racket, which was being run from Aligarh in western UP, was spread over five states, police said. The alleged fraudsters used to target unemployed youth in Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Odisha.

As per police sources, the department’s Economic Offence Wing arrested Zafar Ahmed, 25, a resident of Civil Lines in Aligarh. An engineering graduate, Ahmed duped an estimated 50,000 job seekers across the country. The racket was being run by a group of tech-savvy IT professionals of UP.

This core group had apparently opened a call centre employing around 50 people at a salary of Rs 15,000 per month. More than 1,000 fake SIM cards and 530 cellphones were used to run the racket, police said. The scamsters used to communicate through WhatsApp voice calls and to avoid identification and used  100 mule bank accounts.