Tech major Infosys lodges FIR over job racket

The first clue that human resources officers at Infosys had of a job racket promising non-existent positions to jobseekers was when people began appearing at the offices of the multinational company with fake offer letters.

In a rare development, the discovery prompted the company to file a First Information Report (FIR) at the Electronics City police station on November 14.

In the complaint, Santosh Kumar Nair of the HR Department stated that an individual named Sumesh had been masquerading as an Infosys HR officer. The report specified that Sumesh had appeared on electronic media, promising jobseekers positions in the company if they approached him directly.

While Nair declined to make a comment, a spokesperson for Infosys said that the company never carries out recruitments through agents. "The company has a strict policy of not using agents to secure talent," the spokesperson said.

There is no clarity on how many people have been scammed or how much each victim paid Sumesh. The affected people came from a variety of backgrounds, a source said.

The scams, however, seem frequent enough for the company to issue an alert on recruitment fraud on the careers page of its website. In the page, the company specifies that "Infosys follows a merit-based employee recruitment practice with extensive screening steps."

The statement acknowledged that "there has been an increase in recruitment fraud involving scammers who post fraudulent job openings, or who contact jobseekers with fake job offers."

The spokesperson noted that the company currently did not have an HR manager named Sumesh on its payroll.

Police have opened a case against Sumesh under the Information Technology Act, 2000, for cheating and cheating by impersonation.