Mumbai The MRA Marg police station has registered a case based on a complaint by the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) about a fake website that that been advertising jobs via social media in MbPT’s name. Scores of hopeful job-seekers have so far fallen for the scam and paid up ₹1,000 each as application fee.
The police registered the case based on a complaint lodged by Balasubramanian Vajapeyajula, a joint director of MbPT. According to the complaint, several MbPT officials, including chairman Rajiv Jalota, have been flooded with e-mails, phone calls and messages from those who applied, who are now demanding their money back after getting no response to their job applications on the website.
Jalota said that MbPT had submitted all relevant material to the police. It has now put up an alert on its website mumbaiport.gov.in, stating that it does not advertise vacancies on social media and neither does it charge any application fee.
“One of the complainants, a Bachelor of Engineering student, who applied for the vacancy on the fake website, realised that something was amiss when he was asked to pay the application fee via Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is rather uncommon,” said a police officer. “He then wrote to the MbPT authorities.”
The police officer said that the cops would take the help of the cyber cell to ferret out the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the fake website and trace the scamsters. “We will also check to which bank accounts the money paid by the job applicants has been transferred. Our immediate step is to take down the website,” he said. A case of cheating and impersonation by using computer resources under the Information Technology Act, 2000, has been registered by the MRA Marg police station.