Mumbai: Woman and her 12 employees held for duping job seekers with fake hiring advertisements

MUMBAI: Sahar police arrested a 32-year-old woman and her 12 employees, including a minor office boy, for allegedly duping few hundreds of job seekers from whom Rs 2,000 to Rs 3,000 were collected as training and registration fees in the last six months reportedly for a ground staff with the Taj Sats Air Catering Limited at International Airport.

Mastermind Sakhina Motarwala alias Saniya (32) has been running fake job interviews in a 1000-sqft plus office situated near Sakinaka Metro Station and committed the offence after she along with her staffs posted a fake advertisement on behalf of Taj Sats on Facebook with the photographs of its 11 Chefs (including the Chief Chef) to gain jobseekers trust to dupe.

Motarwala and 11 of her office staffs are in police custody till June 30, while the 17-year-old office boy has been detained and handed over to his parents.

Police suspect that the fraud was in operation for the last two years and the fraud amount could run into crores of rupees and hardly anyone was given a job. The fraudster used to collect Rs 400 as registration fee and Rs 1600 for training that is provided in the premise of Universal Group (the fraudster office) that comprises of eight chambers: a recruiting chamber, manager’s chambers, interview room and interestingly “a room that is designed into a lookalike of the interior of an aircraft with seating arrangements”. “Motarwala, a graduate, planned the offence after he has got experience working in the HR department of private firms,” said a police officer.

The fraud was observed when the company’s HR head Dinsha Ankaleshwariya (37) on June 19 was informed by her HR manager Tinu Sule came across the fake job advertisements floated on WhatsApp groups and FB page with details of hiring carried out by the fake company. Sule brought the matter to the notice of HR Chief Ankaleshwariya.

“Sule then checked the FB page and came across a page formed in the name of ‘Airlines Group’ in which Taj Sats name was used showing job opening for flight packing in International Airport with HR Contact number (Sharry). Accordingly, Ankaleshwarya filed a complaint with the Sahar police on June 22 after she verified the fraud by sending one of the office staff to the fraudster’s Universal Group office at Sakinaka and paid Rs 2000 and applied for a job in Taj Sats.

DCP

(Zone VIII) Manjunath Singe led a team—senior inspector Dinkar Shilvate, sub-inspectors Sandeep Yesane, Sanjay Kalhatkar, Anand Nagral, Nagesh Misal and detection staff—carried out the raid and arrested the accused and seized over 22 hard discs, cheque books and other documents from Motarwala’s office. “Taj Sats sent its staff, Sandesh Chalke, to the accused office to verify the fraud and even paid Rs2000 to collect the info before filing the

FIR

,” said the police.

Lawyers—Rakesh Singh, Prabhakar Tripathi and Arun Gupta—appeared for the accused argued in the court that their client is the operating company which provides training to candidates to clear job interview. And they charge Rs 2000 for the same and it is only for training purpose, which every candidate agree and enters in the agreement. Therefore there is no cheating done by their client. Police have arbitrarily arrested them without giving notice u/s. 41(a) of Cr.P.C. “There are some employees who had joined just 2-3 days back in this company who too was arrested,” said Tripathi.

Police are verifying details of the total number of victims who have fallen victims so far. “At least 100 victims have approached us with a complaint against the Universal Group. The fraudster assured the victims with a pay scale of around Rs 26,000 on being hired,” said senior inspector Shilvate.

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