Duo who conned 100+ people seeking jobs in Turkey arrested

Two people have been arrested in Mumbai for allegedly scamming hundreds of people out of jobs in Turkey. The victims collectively lost up to ₹2 crore ($270,000) to the accused, who ran a fake job agency on Facebook. The police have recovered passports and other documents of 125 victims and suspect around 150 people were affected by the scam. The accused charged between ₹50,000 and ₹1 lakh ($675 to $1,350) from each victim and issued fake job offer letters and flight tickets before disappearing. The investigation is ongoing to determine the full extent of the fraud.

Mumbai: Two people have been arrested for allegedly conning hundreds of people under the pretext of giving them jobs in Turkey through a Facebook group that had a lot of job listings. The police suspect that around 150 people have collectively lost up to ₹2 crore to the two accused.

HT Image

The accused, Ghulamgaus Jehangirdar from Latur and Faiyaz Khan from Uttar Pradesh were caught after several people who were cheated landed at the Santacruz police station earlier this week. On Tuesday, the complainant Rashikbhai Patel, a Valsad resident was one of the many others who had come to the police station after finding their office in Santacruz closed.

“I came across the ad floated by Ocean HR Enterprises on a Facebook group Gulf Job Vacancy as I wanted to seek work opportunities overseas. Having worked as a welder in Dubai until 2020, I was told the same job in Turkey could get me $750-1000 a month. They also said that the documentation and other formalities would cost me ₹69,000, which I sent them,” said Patel.

Patel had visited their office to ensure everything was overboard before making the payment. The company had even called him to conduct a medical checkup, for which he was taken to an office complex in Kurla, he told the police. A few days later, he was sent a visa for Turkey and a picture of a Qatar Airways ticket to Turkey under his name.

“On Monday, I was to pick up my passport and the ticket from their office as my flight was on Thursday. However, I found their office shut, and no one was responding to calls. Many others who had also been cheated similarly were also waiting outside the office before we all decided to approach the police,” said Patel.

He said that the shopkeepers of the same complex said the office had been shut for the last ten days. Later, he also found out that the ticket he had been sent was fake.

Police found out that the office was running in a rented garage on SV Road in Santacruz West for less than two months. “The agency also issued fake job offer letters, joining letters, and fake flight tickets after collecting money from the victims before closing the office and disappearing. Through technical investigation based on the details provided by the complainants, we could track the two accused within a couple of days,” said an official from the Santacruz police.

Police have recovered passports and other documents of 125 people that they say were all victims of the accused. “These kinds of fraudsters usually rent out office premises that they abandon, often without even paying the rent, within two to three months after they have managed to dupe enough number of people. The documents that they collect through such scams are used for other types of cyber frauds by them,” said deputy commissioner of police for Zone 9 Krishnakant Upadhayay.

In this case, the ads for the fake agency that claimed to facilitate people looking for blue-collar jobs overseas were run on the Facebook group between October 1 and November 27.

The investigating team supervised by DCP Upadhyay and assistant commissioner of police Mahesh Mugutrao, headed by senior inspector Rajendra Kane consisted of inspector Jyoti Hibare, assistant inspector Tushar Sawant, sub-inspector Dattatray Khade, and others.

They tracked the money trials of the bank accounts that were provided by the fraudster to the victims to transfer funds for processing the job applications.

“The accused charged different amounts from each aspirant, ranging from ₹50,000 to ₹1 lakh. To make the operations seem more legitimate, they followed the entire process that a real agency would. The victims found that they had disappeared just a few days before they thought they would be flying to Turkey,” said the police. They are now trying to assess the exact number of victims and the amount of fraud that the accused were involved in.