Railway Police in Bengaluru and other major cities in Karnataka have arrested seven persons in connection with black marketing of railway tickets over the last two weeks and seized 321 railway tickets worth more than Rs 4 lakh.
The seven persons arrested are part of Ramakrishna Tours and Travels and Manu Tours and Travels of Bengaluru, Ambika Electrical and Hardware Shop of Periyapatna, Mysuru, Meenaxi -Iway Internet, Belagavi.
Officials said these accused misused the e-ticketing, ticket counter facility and deprived the general public of tickets from ticket counters and the IRCTC website.
“In the case of the four firms, computer accessories, mobiles, E-tickets and cash were also seized. Cases have been booked against these touts under section 143 of Railway Act,” E Vijaya, Chief Public Relations Officer South Western Railway, said.
These operations were part of the nationwide crackdown on such touts initiated by the IT cell of the Indian Railways. In total, 387 such persons were arrested by railway police for alleged black-marketing of more than 20,000 tickets.
Elaborating on this, Debasmita Chattopadhyay Banerjee, Divisional Security Commissioner, said, “We went on an all-out drive against these touts based on our local intelligence. We understand software are being used to manipulate the central servers remotely. We are still carrying out our investigation on the specifics of these software and how exactly it bypasses the central system.”
“The kingpin is not based in Bengaluru or this division. But we have identified the person and we will soon arrest him. As we are trying to scrutinise fishy IP addresses and blacklisting them, they are also advancing themselves by masking their IP addresses and other sophisticated means,” she added.
Post their arrest, all these agents have lost their IRCTC agent logins.
“All the people who have been arrested accepted their guilt in front of the court. There is no conflict in that. We have already blacklisted them and we will ensure that they cannot do any business involving any government agencies,” she further added.