Ishu Verma, also known as Rahul Saxena, a former employee of IndiGo has been conning people with fake job offers. He conducted interviews, both online and face-to-face, and even handed people fake appointment letters.
He would get the unsuspecting victims to pay up lakhs of rupees in instalments. Many have paid Rs 50 lakhs to him in batches. Saxena used to work as a body mass index (BMI) officer with the airline.
This isn’t the only employment scam that has come to light. Job scams have been on the rise across the country, especially online. Several people in Kashmir have been tricked into being part of surveys in exchange for a significant payment. However, once the surveys are completed they are asked to pay some money in order to receive their wages.
Those looking for remote jobs are the primary victims. The scamsters win the confidence of their victims by inviting them to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ social-media profiles and even make them payments daily, directly to their accounts, leading them to believe that they are part of a well-established enterprise. The victims are then added to a Telegram group, where scammers set up crypto-trading platforms, and push people to invest and perform tasks to grow their funds. Additionally, by creating fake online wallets, the scammers manage to earn the victims’ trust and lead them to believe that their money is safe. However, once they have invested a significant sum, they are unable to retrieve their money.
An employee of an insurance firm recently lost over Rs 11 lakh after getting drawn into an online job fraud. The victim was offered a parti-time job. It all began with him being asked to rate and review a hotel in Delhi, for which he was paid Rs 150. He was then added to a prepaid task group on the Telegram app. The fraudsters created a bogus website and convinced him to create an account on the same. Two days later, the man was told to transfer Rs 59,000 in order to take up a task. When he did as was instructed, an amount of Rs 82,600 appeared as ‘earnings’ in the account created in his name on the fake website. However, he was not allowed to withdraw his earnings until he completed more tasks, and ended up losing over Rs 11 lakhs in the process.
