- Wednesday, March 05, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
In a shocking allegation of job fraud, police in India’s capital Delhi are looking into a complaint that nearly 30 men were tricked into counting trains for days.
The men were under the impression that they were receiving training for a job with the Indian Railways, the BBC reported.
A former official of the Indian Army, who said he put the men in contact with the alleged scammers without knowing it, informed the cops about the fraud.
According to local media, the victims paid between Rs 200,000 (£2,000) and Rs 2.4 million (£23,913) each to get the work.
Officials from Delhi Police’s economic offences wing started probing the alleged scam last month but the news became public only in the past week.
The men, who hail from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, were reportedly asked to stand at different platforms of the main railway station in Delhi for eight hours daily for about a month. There, they kept counting trains that passed through the station each day, the Press Trust of India reported.
They were allegedly promised that they would be employed as ticket examiners, traffic assistants or clerks in the Indian Railways, one of the country’s biggest employers.
One of the men told The Indian Express that he was seeking ways to support his family after the devastating Covid-19 pandemic.
“We went to Delhi for training – all we had to do was count trains. We were sceptical of the activity, but the accused was a good friend of our neighbour. I feel ashamed now,” he was quoted as saying.
Subbuswamy, the former army man who approached the police, told PTI that he had been helping young people from his hometown in Tamil Nadu’s Virudhunagar district find jobs “without any monetary interest” for himself.
He said that he met a person named Sivaraman who claimed to know lawmakers and ministers and offered to find government employment for unemployed people.
He put Subbuswamy and the victims in touch with another man, who even took the job-seekers for false medical examinations.
The man stopped taking phone calls from them later.
According to some of the victims, they even borrowed money to pay the scammers.
In March last year, police in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad said they had arrested two men accused of tricking several candidates who thought they were being hired by the country’s railways.
