CBI busts Lucknow gang of 8 that used copycat Railway website in job racket

The CBI has busted a gang engaged in duping people by providing them fake recruitment in Railways complete with even a fictitious training to "recruits" at Charbagh Railway station in Lucknow.

The agency arrested eight persons who ran a a near perfect recruitment racket using a deceptively similar website of Railway Recruitment Boardand the "modified" office of a lower rung employee at Charbagh station to "train" and con people, officials said today.

The racketeers have taken Rs 300,000-500,000 from each of the gullible candidate to ensure "selection" in group C and D in the Railways, they said.

"Searches were conducted at the premises of accused persons at 8 locations in Delhi, Lucknow, Jaipur, Sonepat and Agra which led to recovery of several incriminating documents, mobile phones, bank cards, seals and cash," the CBI spokesperson said here.

Those arrested included Santosh Singh alias Satyaveer Singh , Agra, Shrikant Gupta alias Rahul and Nitin Singh alias Rajan of Lucknow, Bhima Rao alias Kishore and Dharmendra Kumar Saini of Chomu (Rajasthan), Rajesh Sharma of Sonepat (Haryana) and Sonu Verma, and Manish Parmar of Delhi, he said.

In order to present the exercise as genuine, the accused followed the government recruitment procedure in which applicants, mostly from Rajasthan, were short-listed and asked to get medical fitness certificates from a government hospital.

Even recruitment test was done and results were published on the website, the spokesman said.

The racketeers cleverly winnowed out candidates who had scored well in faux tests to keep only gullible ones in the reckoning in order to avoid any trouble, the CBI statement said.

Those short listed were even sent to a training course in collaboration with a private institute in Dehradun before being sent for "on-job training" in Lucknow at the prestigious Charbagh Railway station, it said.

Room of a lower rung official on the station was "modified" as an office for these "recruits" where they were asked to perform sundry jobs on the station, the agency said.

All was going well till the CBI spoiled the party carrying out searches at the eight locations and arrested the accused, it said.