Mumbai: Two female graduates’ fake airline job scam busted

Pooja Singh and Neha Sharma

The North Region Cyber Cell of the Mumbai Crime Branch recently apprehended two female graduates on charges of deceiving numerous individuals by falsely offering positions as ground staff in prominent airlines. These women, identified as Neha Sharma, 29, and Pooja Singh, 23, both B. Com graduates, were arrested from Hapur in Uttar Pradesh. Authorities discovered that the accused collected resumes from various job search websites, posing as Human Resource (HR) representatives from well-known airline companies.

Their arrest followed a complaint from a 37-year-old man who claimed to have lost Rs 12.36 lakh in pursuit of an airline ground staff job. The victim recounted that the accused had impersonated HR professionals from an airline company, instructing him to make payments under the pretence of completing various procedures. Despite hoping for a well-paying airline job (estimated from R50K to R60K), the complainant ended up losing his hard-earned savings. The accused even provided him with a forged appointment letter from IndiGo Airlines, leaving the victim deceived.

The investigation uncovered that the accused possessed forged letterheads from different airline companies, indicating that numerous individuals may have fallen victim to their scheme. While several transactions totalling Rs 10K to Rs 50K have been identified, it is suspected that many victims have not reported the fraud. Authorities are sharing details with counterparts and all police stations in Mumbai to identify potential additional complainants.

The accused's modus operandi involved downloading resumes from thousands of candidates through the Quikr Jobs platform, posing as recruitment agencies' staff. By paying to access these resumes, they then reached out to candidates, assuming the guise of HR representatives from various airlines. They orchestrated counterfeit interviews and, in certain instances, enlisted other individuals to impersonate selectors, defrauding victims of thousands and even lakhs of rupees.

The case was registered in May this year, and after a thorough investigation involving scrutiny of accounts and mobile numbers, the cyber cell arrested the culprits last week. Due to the culprits' use of fake documents for registration, the process took months to bring them to justice.

Rs 12.36L
Amount the complainant allegedly lost