Boom Time In City For Fake Job Rackets

Creating sham websites & staging interviews at posh hotels, scamsters loot job-seekers hit by rising unemployment

- Chayyanika Nigam and Puneet Sharma

ON JANUARY 15, Shipra Singh, a 22-year-old postgraduate in Commerce from Noida read on Instagram that Thailand-based ‘Yo Air’ airline was hiring for cabin crew. After the initial interaction, she was asked to appear for an interview at a hotel near Bangla Sahib Gurudwara.

When asked to submit a demand draft of Rs 2.5 lakhs, Shipra suspected foul play. “As many as 250 aspirants including me had assembled at the hotel for the interview and all of us were asked to submit the money before any selection procedure would begin,” said Shipra.

When the hotel management informed the police, it turned out the interviews were part of a fake job racket run by Mumbai resident Sanket Jha. Jha was subsequently arrested. During investigations, it was revealed that no airline with such a name existed.

Kalkaji resident Amrita Pal (27),desperately looking for a job, was among those who also fell for the fake airline advertisement, “We sensed something was wrong as he was demanding money. Later, we learnt that he was trying to con us,” she said.

This is not a one-off incident. Fake job rackets have become a booming industry in the Capital, thanks to shrinking jobs in the private and public sector. In Delhi itself more than 1,000 such complaints have been registered since 2016. So much so that many companies and legitimate job portals have put up advisories on their websites to warn applicants about scams.

In the last one week itself, the Delhi Police busted two fake job rackets which duped hundreds of job aspirants of lakhs of rupees on the pretext of placing them in a good company. The police claim that such rackets are mushrooming due to growing unemployment.