Mumbai A travel agent has been arrested for allegedly cheating a businessman to the tune of ₹10 lakh by giving him fake flight tickets to the United States of America for him and his family.
Dhiraj Mulchandani, 48, a travel agent by profession with an office in Mahim, met 37-year-old Swapnil Kale, who owns a private firm and provides training to employees working in the information technology sector, through a common friend a few years ago.
Swapnil told the police that between 2017 and 2019, the accused had provided him and his family members 12 fake tickets. The first was in 2017, when he promised to book them a holiday package to the USA at a cheaper rate and gave them fake tickets. In 2019, he followed the same modus operandi and sold them fake tickets for a Maldives trip. Swapnil had even extended financial assistance of ₹5 lakh to the accused when his wife’s father was admitted in a hospital in 2016. He claimed that the accused was supposed to return the amount in two months, but he did not.
“Mulchandani knew that I travel to foreign destinations a lot for business purposes and therefore, he offered to provide air tickets at discounted rates. Initially, he gave me a ticket at a lesser price for US so I started trusting him and also thought that the ₹5 lakh would be settled in tickets,” said Kale in his statement to the police.
“Mulchandani then promised us a holiday package in 2017. I asked him to book four tickets for me and my family in December 2017. Each ticket cost us ₹90,000. But, when we reached the airport and showed the tickets to the airline’s counter, they told us that the tickets were fake. I then called the accused, who did not pick up. We had already booked hotels in the US. It was a huge loss for us,” said Kale in his complaint.
He added that three months later, when he met the accused, the latter informed him that one of his close relatives had expired and therefore he could not take his calls. “He then gave us another holiday package in 2019 for Maldives, but again the tickets turned out to be fake,” he added.
He had filed a complaint in 2020, but the police registered an FIR in April this year. “The accused was wanted and we managed to arrest him on Sunday. He is in police custody,” said police inspector Jaideep Gaikwad of the Nehru Nagar police station