In Gujarat, The Railway Protection Force has excavated a gang that involved different professionals of people, such as travel agents, touts, and software developers, they bought confirmed train tickets worth ₹28 Cr from IRCTC using illicit software to sell them to the travelers at a high price, as per the officials.
Gang Arrested For Buying Train Tickets illegally
RPF team, Rajkot Division, Western Railway has arrested six persons involved in this case and has recovered 1,688 train tickets worth ₹43.42 Lakh which were unsold, informed by Pavan Kumar Srivastava, Divisional Security Commissioner, Rajkot RPF.
They learned how to use the technology for crime, they used temporary ‘disposable’ phone numbers and emails to create IDs on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation or IRCTC portal to generate One Time Password or OTPs. Moreover, they used illegal software to generate fake IP addresses. All of this was revealed by a thorough investigation, mentioned Srivastava.
“Based on a specific tip-off, our team had arrested Rajkot-based travel agent Manan Vaghela in May. Using illegal software, Vaghela used to purchase confirmed railway tickets from the IRCTC portal in bulk. Later, we arrested one Kanhaiya Giri from Mumbai in July for selling the software,” he further added.
Abhishek Sharma, a software developer, who lives in Vapi Town, Valsad, Gujarat, was arrested by the RPF. On other hand, Giri was their ‘super distributor’ of this illicit software including COVID-X, and Black Tiger, which sharma developed.
Further, based on the info provided by this group, RPF also arrested inter-state members of this racket which were specified as “Aman Sharma, Virendra Gupta, and Abhishek Tiwari”. They were all detained from Mumbai, Valsad, and Sultanpur (Uttar Pradesh), respectively.
“Since IRCTC has capped the number of tickets that can be booked from a single computer, the accused developed software to generate several fake IP addresses. This would help them in booking tickets in bulk using a single computer,” a senior RPF official said.
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He said, “He said certain travel agents were provided with “disposable” mobile phone numbers and email IDs by the gang to create fake user IDs on the IRCTC portal and to get the OTP for each ID.”
“Tickets worth ₹ 28.14 crores were purchased using such fraudulent means and the gang members earned a huge commission by selling those tickets,” Mr. Srivastava explained.
