NEW DELHI: With the arrest of 18 people including two Nigerian nationals , Delhi Police has claimed to have busted a major racket in which fraudulent mails offering jobs to gullible youths in several reputed companies were sent to dupe them of lakhs of rupees.

The gang especially targeted people living in southern part of the country as they were under the impression the victims will not come searching for them in Delhi or approach police.

Delhi Police had received around 300 complaints of this nature from across the country acting on which an FIR was registered at Crime Branch Police Station in August this year.

"The gang also perceived that as people from southern cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore were more tech-savvy and fluent in English, cheating them through email will be easier," said Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Yadav.

Although such cases have been reported in the past as well, but in this case, what is interesting is that the kingpin of the gang operated from Nigeria and ran the entire gang with the help of two modules which had no clue about each other's existence.

"There were two modules of this gang, the first part consisted of the two Nigerians, identified as Chinedu Cyprial (24) and Dubuisi Charles (28) and two other associates who are still absconding.

"They used to procure email IDs of gullible job seekers from various job search engines and sent them fake job offers in the name of reputed and well known companies," said Yadav.

The duo procured activated SIM cards of various service providers from mobile shops on high rates. These were issued on fake documents.

They then used to create fake email IDs which looked like official email ids of the company and sent fraudulent offer letters to the victims quoting handsome salary packages to the tune of lakhs of rupees, police said.

"Once their victim was convinced. they asked them to deposit an 'Interview Security Deposit' in bank accounts specified by them. The amount varied from person to person. They also asked them to send payment slip through email.

"When the victim deposited money, they asked for more money on one pretext or the other," said Yadav.