Fake helicopter ticket booking racket unearthed, 4 arrested

New Delhi, June 3 (IANS) The Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police's Special Cell has busted a fake helicopter ticket booking module and arrested four persons in this connection, an official said on Friday.

The accused were identified as Deepak Thakur, a resident of Uttar Pradesh, and Jeki Prasad Kahar, Pappu Singh, and Vikash Kumar Bhagat -- all three residents of West Bengal.

Furnishing details, DCP (IFSO) KPS Malhotra said a complaint was received at Cyber Crime regarding some unknown persons who cheated the complainant, on the pretext of booking helicopter tickets for visiting Mata Vaishno Devi temple shrine, Jammu.

During the enquiry, the NCRP (National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal) was analysed and about 112 complaints were found linked to the same syndicate, in which innocent people were cheated by the alleged persons through the same modus operandi.

"On technical analysis, the locations of suspected persons were located in Bihar, West Bengal and Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh," the DCP said.

Subsequently, a police team was constituted which conducted simultaneous raids in Firozabad, UP, Bihar and West Bengal and arrested the four accused persons.

"More than 100 complaints with the same modus operandi were analyzed and after analysis, the suspected phone numbers/bank account details of the mastermind i.e website developer were traced from Firozabad, UP and a huge number of hard disks and two laptops and 5 mobile phones were recovered," the official added.

During interrogation it was revealed that the accused were all part of an organised gang headed by accused Deepak Thakur (website developer) who is a B.Tech student and designed the websites for cheating innocent religious travellers and for siphoning off the cheated amount they used many fake bank accounts.

The modus operandi of this gang was that they used to make a fake website for helicopter ticket booking which seemed similar to the government authorised agents' websites and they received the booking amount in bank accounts which they opened under.

They kept the cheque books and ATM cards of aforesaid bank accounts with them to immediately withdraw the cheated amount.