Chennai youth loses Rs 10 lakh to railway job bait; 3 held

CHENNAI: Three persons, who are associates of a recently terminated Southern Railway employee, have been arrested by the job racket wing of the Avadi City Police for allegedly swindling Rs 10 lakh from a job aspirant promising a railway job.

The police identified the former southern railway staff as K Gaurav Kumar who is absconding. The arrested persons were identified as M Vijay (42), R Vijay (43) and M Vinoth Kumar (33).

M Vijay works as a lab instructor at a private college in Sriperumbudur while R Vijay was into building construction and claimed to work as a journalist in a monthly magazine, police said. Vinoth Kumar works as a delivery agent with a courier firm.

In 2023, the complainant, T Ramakrishnan (24), had approached M Vijay for a government job after the latter claimed that he could help get a job in Railways.

Through Vijay, Ramakrishnan got in touch with Gaurav Kumar, a Union leader who claimed that he could get a Travel Ticket Examiner (TTE) job for the complainant’s nephew and demanded Rs 10 lakh for the same. The complainant transferred Rs 10 lakh to the three accused (Rs 3 lakh each to M Vijay and R Vijay and Rs 4 lakh to Vinoth Kumar) in March 2023. However, all of them did not respond to Ramakrishnan’s phone calls after the money was transferred.

Based on a complaint, Avadi City Police’s Job Racket Wing Inspector Albin Brigit Mary and Sub Inspector Velmurugan conducted inquiries and arrested the accused.

The probe revealed that Gaurav Kumar was already arrested by Chennai Police in a similar case and he was terminated recently after a departmental inquiry.

Police raid unauthorised manpower agencies

Similarly, based on a complaint from the Protector of Emigrants (PoE) in Chennai to the Police Commissioner seeking action against the unauthorised overseas employment agencies in the city, a raid was conducted on Wednesday in which five persons were arrested.

The team recovered 146 Indian passports, 15 visa forms, seven computers, 24 laptops, 15 mobile phones, two hard disks, two printers, three swiping machines, one iPad, and three CPUs.

Police said that they have identified nine firms that are operating in Chennai without any authorisation and luring job aspirants with a false promise of employment opportunities in Singapore, Malaysia, and other foreign countries.

Police arrested Syed Mohammed Sahabuddin, the MD of SIMA Consultancy in Thousand Lights, Ramkumar, the MD of Aram Visa Pvt Ltd in Anna Salai, Mageshwaran, the Manager of Aram Visa, Karthick Babu, the Consultant of Migrantz Service Pvt Ltd in Egmore and Eesa Mariya Babu, the MD of Business Point HR Solutions Pvt Ltd in Kolathur.