Job racket busted in Mumbai: Blind kingpin, aide held

A 55-year-old blind man and his accomplice were arrested on Friday in Dongri for allegedly duping four people of lakhs of rupees on the pretext of providing them high-salaried jobs abroad.

The accused identified as Abdul Razzaq Shaikh alias George, who is visually impaired, and Johar Ismail Shaikh alias Java alias Narendra.

The police busted the racket on the complaint of a 34-year-old Tamil Nadu resident Chailappa Sugupatti. He had approached Abdul through a Tamil Nadu-based tour operator few months back. The accused then offered him a job of an electrical engineer on a ship overseas. Sugupatti paid him an amount of Rs 1.4 lakh for the employment process and when the accused started avoiding his phone calls, he approached the police.

Senior inspector of Dongri police station Vilas Gangawane formed a police team headed by assistant inspector Arun Thorat. "We suspect that since Abdul had earlier worked with placement agencies, he knew how they function. He then started maintaining contacts with the people running tour and travel agencies across the country, who could refer job-hunting people to him for overseas jobs," said Thorat.

The accused also gave appointment certificates to their clients to win their trust and extract money, he added. The probe revealed that they used to meet the clients on streets to hand them offer letters and avoid trouble. If anyone doubted them they used to take them to an office they had opened to cheat them.

Four people have already approached the police and more victims are likely to come forward soon, another officer said. "The two arrested accused have been booked under Sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating), 465 (forgery), 468 (Forgery for purpose of cheating) and 471 (Using as genuine a forged document) of Indian Penal Code. The two have been remanded in police custody up to March 3 by a local court," said Thorat. Police are currently on the lookout for other members of the racket.