Indian Railways

ticketing scam

Bangalore

(Left to Right) TOP BOSS - Hamid Ashraf, Dubai; INDIA BOSS - Ghulam Mustafa, Bangalore; WESTERN REGION BOSS - Deepal Saha, Mumbai; ‘GURUJI’, - known to be the gang’s financial brain He received Rs 13 lakh from Mustafa recently through a bank transfer

Tatkal tickets

Thehas busted possibly the biggest ticket booking gang yet, involving a team of software engineers in Dubai, IP addresses emanating from Yugoslavia and a sophisticated corporate-like structure in India comprising a country head, super-admins, lead-sellers and over 20,000 agents.The Railway Protection Force (RPF), which took nearly two months to get to the roots of the scam, has identified a certain Hamid Ashraf, who operates out of Dubai, as the gang’s mastermind. Ashraf was arrested in 2016 in Gonda in UP in aand investigators believe he was also involved in a 2019 bomb blast in UP.In just the past couple of weeks, the RPF has arrested 26 people, including the gang’s India head, identified as Ghulam Mustafa, who was picked up fromon January 19. The gang’s western region head, Deepal Saha alias Danny Saha, was nabbed in Borivali on board Paschim Express on January 22 as he tried to flee to Gujarat.According to a report submitted by the RPF with its Director General Arun Kumar, the gang cornered on an average 50 per cent of the tickets sold in the country on any given day in just the first 40 seconds of the online booking opening. This was done using a software that allowed the 20,000 agents to bypass not only security clearances like CAPTCHA that detects bots, but also the process of OTP generation and submission.This gave the gang’s agents an advantage of around 30 seconds over other travel agents and individual customers, allowing them to corner hundreds of thousands of tickets before others could even log-in. The software – a new version of which was generated every day to escape Indian Railway’s cyber vigilance – also helped agents generate 500 different IPs on a single computer.Ashraf’s team would send the new software every morning to Mustafa, who, in turn, would send it to 30 super-admins. The super-admins would then connect with 300 lead-sellers, who had over 20,000 agents under their command.A confirmed train ticket is extremely hard to come by in India, especially in smaller towns. A confirmed ticket on an important route can earn apremium of Rs 200 to Rs 500. During the festival season, there are long queues at ticket windows. Even, for which the railways charge ahefty premium, are nearly impossible to get at a ticket window. One of the main reasons for this is gangs like Ashraf’s that corner tickets in bulk online, creating a shortage.According to an officer, the gang’s India head, Mustafa, is an international operator and has contacts in Pakistan, Bangladesh, the middleeast, Indonesia and Nepal. He also specialises in creating fake Aadhar cards.A senior RPF officer, who did not wish to be identified, said the investigators are now looking for a gang member identified only as Guruji, who appears to manage the group’s finances. Investigations so far have revealed that Guruji uses a Yugoslavian number and virtual private network (VPN). “Guruji got about Rs 13 lakh from Mustafa recently through a bank transfer,” the officer said.