Western Railway has been conducting special drives and raids against touts, luring innocent passengers and charging exorbitant illegal commissions. Taking intensive action against touts, special drives have been regularly conducted by Western Railway’s Railway Protection Force (RPF) in all six Divisions. In this very direction, under the mission 'Operation Uplabdh', the Anti-Touting Team of Rajkot Division apprehended six persons involved in touting, development and sale of illegal softwares and using fake user IDs of IRCTC for booking tickets illegally.
According to a press release issued by Sumit Thakur – Chief Public Relations Officer of Western Railway, recently an RPF team comprising of Anti-Touting Team of Rajkot Division & Cyber Cell – HQ succeeded in nabbing the culprit Travel Agent Mannan Vaghela of Rajkot who was using illegal software i.e. COVID-19 to corner railway tickets in bulk. Further, another person named Kanhaiya Giri (super Seller of illegal Softwares COVID-X, ANMSBACK, BLACK TIGER etc.) was arrested recently from Mumbai on the basis of information provided by Vaghela. During interrogation, Giri spilled the beans and revealed the names of other associates and Admin/Developer Abhishek Sharma of Vapi, who was also arrested. Abhishek Sharma confessed about having been the Admin for selling of all these Illegal Softwares. On the basis of leads provided by the arrested accused persons, 3 more accused persons, namely Aman Kumar Sharma, Virendra Gupta and Abhishekh Tiwari were arrested from Mumbai, Valsad (Gujarat) and Sultanpur (UP) respectively. These accused persons were involved in development and sale of illegal softwares using social media i.e. Telegram, WhatsApp etc. along with providing fake Virtual Numbers and Fake user IDs of IRCTC. These accused had softwares to create fake IP addresses, used to bypass the restriction imposed on customers to obtain limited no of tickets per IP address. They sold disposable mobile numbers and disposable emails too which are used for OTP verification to create fake user IDs of IRCTC. RPF is in search of few more suspects involved in this case.
Thakur further informed that during the course of legal action against all these accused persons in this case, approx. 1700 tickets valued Rs. 43.43 lakhs where journey could not be started have been seized and forfeited. Also, five Laptops, seven mobiles, a Portable hard disk, 8336 fake IRCTC IDs and 50 Fake Sim cards have been seized. In the past, they had procured and sold tickets worth 28.14 crores earning huge commission. This shows the extent of generation of black money which could have funded other nefarious activities. The inputs revealed by the accused are being examined by a team to plug the loopholes and take measures to stop such practice. This operation will continue in future to keep a check on such illegal activities.
