The CBI has busted a fake railway recruitment board in Kolkata that had ‘recruited’ more than 300 job aspirants from Tamil Nadu and Kerala after collecting more than Rs 6 lakh from each of them over the last two years.
The six arrested persons include agents, one of them a woman, from Tamil Nadu and a retired postal department employee from Delhi, according to senior government sources here.
Among the arrested are Kannan, Jayavelu from Theni, Suresh Gupta of New Delhi, Kalyanaraman and Adaikappan of Salem and Mary from Tiruchy. Kannan and Gupta who were remanded last week at CBI court in Chennai, while the rest were remanded Monday.
Several people who lost their money through these agents had initially approached Southern Railway with their complaints.
On the advice of railway officials, the victims lodged a complaint with the CBI suspecting that officials from Eastern Railway could be behind the scam.
“We gave the complaint to the CBI a few weeks ago. They started arresting the agents last week,” one of the job aspirants who had been cheated told Deccan Chronicle Monday. The man said that he had paid more than Rs 6 lakh to an agent.
The job aspirant said that it would not be possible for the agents to take people for a ride without the involvement of some railway officials.
Many of the victims feel that such scams would not happen without the knowledge of local politicians as Kolkata is the base of the Trinamul Congress, which holds the railway portfolio in the central ministry.