Travel agent behind bars for cheating job aspirants

  The accused has been identified as Sri Raj (33), a resident of Tavarekere. He hails from Uppinangadi in Mangalore district and runs a travel agency in the City. He had settled down in Bangalore four years ago.

Over a period of time, he mastered tips involved in the travel field, including air travel. He identified unemployed youths and lured them by assuring jobs abroad, in Singapore and Malaysia. He would collect huge sums from them, also their passport and other certificates, booked air tickets to Singapore and Malaysia and would accompany them to these two countries.

He would take them to some office in some high-tech building, ask them to wait outside and would go away promising that he would return soon. Later, he would take a flight and return to Bangalore. The victim would wait for him. They would find it tough to manage the affairs and somehow manage to return to Bangalore, added the police.

The cheating came to light when a group of five persons lodged a complaint with the police against Sri Raj. “The number of unemployed youth duped by him is not yet known. The number is likely to go up. We are yet to ascertain how much money he collected from them. He cheated the five complainants over the last one-and-half months. Any person, cheated in this fashion by him, can contact the police,” said the inspector adding more details will be out once interrogation gets over.

Fake plywood seized

The CCB sleuths arrested four persons for allegedly cheating customers and recovered 3,200 low quality fake plywood sheets of well-known companies, raw materials used to manufacture the same worth Rs 50 lakh. The accused have been identified as Ravindra of Mahalakshmipuram, Nagaraj of Maruthinagar, Sushanth of Hampinagar and Onath Bharman of Girinagar. Sushanth and Onath hail from Kooch Bihar area in Kolkata.

The accused ran a plywood shop named Sriram Plywood Agencies in RPC Layout. They violated the Copyright Act, used seals of well-known plywood manufacturing companies, manufactured poor quality plywood sheets, pasted labels of the original companies on them and used to sell them to customers.

Based on a tip off, the police raided the shop, recovered the materials and arrested the accused.