A two-man gang has been arrested by the Railway Protection Force (RPF) in Hyderabad on charges of using fake letterheads of Member of Parliament (MP) and Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) of various states to confirm berths under the emergency quota (EQ). Officials from the railway said the scam came to light when alert officials from the EQ cell noticed an unusually high number of requests from nine letterheads of MPs or MLAs from different states, including Goa, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Kerala. Based on the information gathered by the RPF Cyber Cell,a joint team of Crime Investigation Branch, Hyderabad, and RPF Malkajgiri swung into action and nabbed one person named Dilip Nayak (33) from IDA Bollaram, Hyderabad.
During questioning, Nayak informed the RPF team that he got acquainted with one person named Mukesh Chouhan, who used fake letterheads of MPs and MLAs for confirming waitlisted tickets against money. Since then, the RPF team was on the hunt for the absconded Chouhan. On July 4, using a decoy, the RPF team nabbed Chouhan, who was operating a shop to unauthorisedly book railway tickets. During raids, the RPF team seized 84 used tickets valued at Rs 1,66,476 from the accused persons. A case has been registered under the Railways Act.
The accused used to download the letterheads of the MPs and MLAs from the internet, forging the contents, and then used them for confirming berths under the VIP quota of Railways. Gajanan Mallya, General Manager, South Central Railways, cautioned people against falling for such fraudsters.
In another development, the Secunderabad railway station has hiked railway station platform ticket cost to Rs 50, earlier the cost of a platform ticket was Rs 30. The prices were hiked from Rs 10 to Rs 30 in 2018. The cost of a platform ticket is now higher than the highest MMTS train fare of Rs 15.