30 Men Arrested from Mumbai Airport with Fake Tickets, Visas to Kuwait

Thirty men planning to travel from Mumbai to Kuwait were arrested at the Mumbai international airport by the police when it was found that their tickets and visas were fake. The men had come from Siddharth Nagar in Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai.

A group of 95 men, including the 30 who were arrested, were given fake visas, tickets and charged Rs 1 lakh each for jobs in Kuwait by three agents, who have been booked. The agents were identified as Briddhi Chandra Jaiswal, who was reportedly the mastermind, and Roshan and Jogendra Sharma.

The arrested men, who are mostly poor farmers, were promised jobs in Kuwait by Jaiswal, who set up his business at Navghad in Siddharth Nagar district. He distributed fliers quoting different prices for different jobs. One had to pay Rs 55,000 to get a job of a computer operator, and so on.

The 95 men were brought to Mumbai by Jaiswal and lodged at a hotel in Jogeshwari East. On Oct. 28 evening, when Jaiswal and the other agents did not respond to phone calls, only 30 of the men decided to head for the airport.

“Roshan and Sharma came to the hotel on Saturday night and gave fake visas and tickets to the 90 men, and took the rest of the money from them. The remaining five people were told that they would get their tickets, visas and passports before they board the flight,” Ram Jaiswal, the cousin of one of the arrested men, Rahul Vijay Kumar, was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times.

“The visas and tickets were found to be fake, hence the CISF handed them over to the Sahar police. The remaining job aspirants backed off and hence were not booked. I informed the police that my cousin, Rahul Kumar, 24, was cheated by the agent, but still he was arrested,” said Ram, according to Mid-Day.

Father of another accused, Barkat Ali, said that they are a family of farmers and his son wanted to go abroad in the hope of making more money but instead he got arrested when he got cheated by the agent.

Police said they have booked the agent and his two aides. “The 30 people arrested are in judicial custody and we are looking for the wanted accused,” a police officer at Sahar Police Station told the media.

The Indian government has repeatedly issued advisories that only authorized agents should be contacted for seeking jobs abroad since many cases of abuse of Indian workers in Gulf nations have come to light.

Job scams have affected people from all strata of society. In June 2017, software engineers working in Bengaluru were cheated of almost Rs 2 crore. The scammers exploited the fear of those working in the IT industry of losing their jobs as multiple organizations were reported to be laying off people.