Man arrested for forging railway e-tickets, cheating customers
Daijiworld Media Network
With Inputs from Media Release
Palakkad (Kerala): The railway protection force, Palakkad, on Saturday September 21 arrested a man for reportedly carrying out business of procuring and supplying unauthorized railway reservation e-tickets at his residence using modern gadgets.
The accused, A Rajkumar of Palakkad used personal computer, high speed broad brand connection, mobile phone, e-mail, different log-in IDs, etc to forge e-tickets. Five railway reservation e-tickets valued at Rs 3,267 for different trains and destinations in different names were found in his possession, railway officials said.
Simultaneously, a search was conducted at the business place of the accused and 13 forged e-tickets with inflated ticket fare valued ` at 16,562 along with CPU of his personal computer, mobile phone etc were seized.
A case was registered in RPF station Palakkad cr no 1297/13, U/s 143 (1) of Railways Act (Amended 2003). The accused was produced before the judicial first class magistrate, Ottapalam on Sunday September 22 and remanded in judicial custody till October 5. The case is under investigation.
Preliminary enquiry revealed that the accused has been indulging in the unauthorized touting business since 2009 and most of his customers are corporate clients. In the wake of ceiling of 10 e-tickets from an individual log-in ID per month by IRCTC, the accused explored an innovative method of creating 35 log-in IDs in the IRCTC portal and carrying on an e-ticketing business unauthorisedly.
The accused reportedly procured tickets from IRCTC as per the demand/requirement of his customers and kept a template of the same in word format in his PC, wherein forged e-tickets, with inflated fare amount varying from Rs 100 to 500 per ticket, were generated. The forged e-ticket would not have the logo of Indian Railway and IRCTC. The accused was thus cheating his customers by creating forged e-tickets and forcing the customers to use the forged ticket as a genuine one.
On receipt of requests from his customers through his mobile, he would book tickets from any of the log-in IDs created by him depending upon the balance in each log-in ID, and after completing the transactions through bank account and credit cards, generate the ticket in the portal itself to find out the status and fare of the ticket. Further, he would create a forged IRCTC e-ticket in word format in his personal computer and the details of the originally generated e-ticket would be filled accordingly by inflating the ticket fare (ranging from Rs 100 to 500) depending upon the demand, season, urgency, requirement of the customer, etc. The forged e-ticket normally would not have the logo of Indian Railways and IRCTC. An SMS confirmation of the ticket was also sent to the customer by the accused. The customer would be provided with the manipulated e-ticket either by hard copy or soft copy as per their choice.
Hence, "the accused Rajkumar, while engaged in unauthorized business of touting also indulges in forging e-tickets, cheating the customers by inflating the ticket fare and forcing them to use forged ticket as genuine ticket etc," stated a media release from the Palakkad railway division.