FROM JOB SEEKER TO JOB SCAMMER

Police officers in five cities said that a dearth of jobs and increasing internet access have led to a surge in scams According to four reputed lawyers, job fraudsters are violating multiple sections of the Indian Penal Code Fraudsters have offered jobs

Police departments across India, dozens of unemployed people, and placement agents all agree: the rate of online job scams skyrocketed this year. Why are so many people being tricked? How much money are they losing? An HT investigation into the tricks of the trade.

RISING MENACE Job scams are proliferating across India, claiming more victims and racking up more cash with each passing year. An investigation by Hindustan Times reveals how the fakejobs industry tricks unemployed people, takes their money and uses them to scam other job seekers. Tracking the intricacies of the con, we arrived at the startling realisation that the seekers and the scammers are often the same people

NEWDELHI: Like many college students, Deepika Chadha was looking to make a little money and get some work experience this summer. In the future, she’d like to be a graphic designer. For the moment, Chadha thought, a call centre job would do. She expected to earn ₹15,000 a month while positioning herself to get a real job, rather than an internship, after she graduates next year.

In June, Chadha created a profile on the job listings website Monster.com and uploaded her résumé. Given her lack of qualifications, the 19-year-old didn’t expect her inbox to be flooded with offers.

But that’s exactly what happened. Dozens of people claiming to represent famous Indian and multinational corporations such as Samsung, Dell, and Airtel wrote to Chadha offering jobs at domestic and international call centres with “good salary packages and unlimited incentives”. Each email began the same way — “Your résumé has been shortlisted for an interview” — and ended the same way — “Call Now”.

This mysterious bounty of job offers was, as Chadha initially suspected, too good to be true. Over the next month, she would go on a wild-goose chase across Delhi following false promises made by job recruiters.

“All they want is to take our money and keep lying,” said Chadha of the people she met in the job-placement industry. “Now I don’t even want a job.”

This type of scam is largely new. A decade ago, call centre jobs were pouring into India. Chadha could have found one quickly. In recent years, however, the economy has not been creating nearly enough jobs for the approximately 12 million people who enter the workforce annually, giving greater power to anyone who promises employment.

Today’s job seekers, meanwhile, are uniquely vulnerable to getting duped. Scammers have realised that the accessibility and anonymity of the web offers the perfect vehicle for deception.

Interviews with senior police officers in five different cities confirmed that a dearth of new jobs and the rise of internet access have led to a surge in such scams. The Bengaluru police department registered 32 cases from the beginning of this year through July, as opposed to six in all of 2016 and only two in 2015. The Hyderabad police registered 225 cases this year through September, as opposed to 171 in 2016 and 131 in 2015. S Jayaram, the additional commissioner of the cybercrime division of the Hyderabad police, said online job frauds are the most commonly reported cybercrime in the city.

According to news reports from the last year collected by Hindustan Times, scamming victims have paid as little as ₹200 and as much as ₹30 lakh to get jobs that were not truly offered to them. In 29 of the 140 news reports, victims lost more than ₹1 lakh. The offers were made on behalf of a wide range of employers: the ministry of home affairs, the Madras high court, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, Mitsubishi, Patanjali Ayurved Ltd…

Consumer complaint websites are full of stories about unemployed people being exploited by dodgy job websites. Placement agencies guarantee jobs that don’t exist. Visa firms do the same, except their clients have to land in a foreign country to figure it out. Sometimes under business pressure, staff members of even genuine job portals such as Naukri and Shine (owned by Hindustan Times Media Ltd, which publishes Hindustan Times), have been accused of promising jobs in exchange for the purchase of their services.

Some people who pay money to get jobs do end up employed, but often in an improbable profession: call centre scammer. The scams might involve tech support, insurance, banking, travel, or even employment. That’s right: many job scammers are themselves the victims of a job scam. There is no clearer indication of this business’s devilish brilliance.

ENTERING THE MAZE

On June 9, Chadha called the number at the bottom of one of the emails she had received. There was little else in the emails besides offers and phone numbers; none provided a physical address or even a website. Instead of full names, the recruiters identified themselves only by generic first names attached to the label “HR”: HR Amit, HR Riya, HR Prince.

The widespread use by job agents of the abbreviation for ‘human resources’ is middlemen between job seekers and fraudulent agencies.

Chadha can’t remember the name of the HR she spoke to over the phone — it was too brief an interaction. Without asking for her name or qualifications, he directed her to Zenith Infotech, a placement agency in Karolbagh.

The next day, a college friend of Chadha’s, Riitu, who was also looking for a summer job, accompanied her to Zenith. At her interview, Chadha was asked to introduce herself and to spell out the acronym BPO. (It stands for ‘business process outsourcing’, a term for the practice, common in India, of contracting a company’s services to a third party.)

Chadha succeeded at these simple tasks, and her interviewer proceeded to lay out her future career path at the company she was about to join. In return for a slip of paper confirming her job at this company, whose name remained a mystery, the interviewer asked Chadha to deposit ₹500.

Following directions sent in an SMS from Zenith, she travelled to Divine Kamal Public School in Uttam Nagar on June 10 for a two-hour class that was supposed to seal the deal. When she arrived, Chadha saw that she wasn’t the only one who’d received such an offer. “There were at least 700 other people in the school on that Saturday,” she said.

Repeated visits by Hindustan Times to Divine and interviews with people who attended classes elsewhere showed that training centres follow the same pattern.

Chadha, Riitu and their fellow attendees paid ₹1,000. In return, their slips from placement agencies got a stamp reading “P.A.I.D.” During the “training”, threefourths of class was spent on the art of self-introduction. “If you know how to introduce yourself,” the students were told, “you can get past 70% of interviews.”

Some job seekers likely wondered why they were being taught interview tips given that they had already landed jobs. They found out when class ended.

In a span of seconds, Divine Kamal Public School transformed into a jobs fair. As many as four companies interviewed candidates in a single classroom, HRs taking the corners and job seekers sitting in rows facing them.

RK Tandon, the chairman of the group that owns Divine, denied that there was anything inappropriate about the weekend events held at the school. “There is no recruitment activity,” he said. “Only one or maximum two times the premises were given for training purposes only, like how to write CV or personality development.” The school, he continued, charges the trainers only for “services like electricity for water”, and does not host anybody who gives “commitment to recruitment” for jobs.

When told of HT’s findings — over seven visits to the school — that attendees were either falsely promised jobs or placed in dubious call centres, Tandon prevaricated. “If this might have happened, it is a matter of investigation for me. This is news to me.”

At the office of the organiser of the training sessions, a placement agency in Barakhamba Road called Tech Planner, an employee who identified himself as HR Sumit accepted that some job seekers are promised jobs they do not ultimately receive. All attendees should, he said, either get placed or get a refund. “But see the job market is so bad, and the companies are not ready to pay any more than 8,000 rupees salary, so many job seekers themselves refuse to join,” he said. Asked about attendees who complain that they did not get a refund or a job, Sumit blamed competitors trying to malign his agency’s name.

ROAD TO NOWHERE

Chadha and Riitu both left Divine with an offer letter and received text messages the next day directing them to a call centre in Kirti Nagar for yet another interview. When they stood in front of the building where they were supposed to start their careers, the young women couldn’t believe their eyes.

“It was like a ghost building — a three storey in which the first two storeys were barely constructed, all brick pillars and rubble,” said Chadha. “I wish I could explain to you the atmosphere of that place. There was not a single fan. Cobwebs covered the walls. There were piles of sand on the floor.” Yet “four to five people were sitting at desks and talking on phones”.

As Chadha and Riitu stood stunned at the top of the staircase, they were approached by an older woman who asked them to follow her to a final interview. She offered each of the girls a job in international calling, but at a monthly salary of only ₹10,000, five thousand rupees less than what Chadha had been told to expect. “She said I should be happy someone was paying me that much,” said Chadha.

She and Riitu had had enough. They fled the building and called their contact person at Zenith Infotech. “You must be crazy to think we will work at a place like this!” shouted Chadha into her phone. The agent asked them not to worry; he had another, better job for them. All they had to do was go to another place in Kirti Nagar.

An hour later, they were walking down smoggy lanes at the end of a back alley to their destination: Ornatus Solutions.

Chadha’s interview didn’t last long. Before she could finish introducing herself, the resident HR had gone through her résumé and informed her that they weren’t “hiring freshers. Only experienced people”.

Chadha was infuriated. “We wouldn’t have paid 1,500 rupees and travelled so far if we knew you wouldn’t hire us,” said Chadha. Her interviewer wasn’t moved. “You are mature enough to know where and who to pay money and where and who not to pay,” she replied, according to Chadha.

Coming out of the building, Chadha called Zenith Infotech once again, this time to demand a refund. “The guy said, ‘Okay!’ But he said he is on leave on that day. I said, ‘What about tomorrow?’ He said his ma’am will be on leave. I said, ‘Okay, why don’t you tell us when to come?’ He said, ‘I will call and let you know in a day or two.’”

REAL JOB OR JOB-ISH?

One day after Deepika Chadha left Ornatus Solutions, another young woman showed up there from that weekend’s batch of trainees at Divine Kamal Public School. Neetu Khatri, a 21-year-old from Narela with blond streaks in her hair, went through the same interview and was hired.

She learned that Ornatus sells the services of a website by the name of Jobishh. Khatri’s job was to dial numbers off a list and rattle off a script: “My name is Neetu. I am calling from Jobishh. We have your CV with us. Are you looking for a job or a job change? We have opportunities for you.”

In a matter of days, Khatri had transformed from the victim of a fake-jobs scam into the perpetrator of one.

On May 31, Naveen Ramachandran, a 39-year-old mid-level manager in Dubai, got a call from another Jobishh employee reading off the same script as Khatri. The person on the phone told him he had been shortlisted for jobs in three well-known companies in the UAE, and that he needed to go to a website called Jobishh and select packages from their catalogue of placement services. He made a series of payments on the website totalling, he said, ₹84,750.

After weeks without hearing from any prospective employers, Ramachandran went online and ran a search on Jobishh. He could have spent days going through all the testimonials of Jobishh victims on consumer complaint portals.

There were 1.5 million job ads on Jobishh’s website as of the first week of October. Most ended with the name of the same recruiting company: Touching Heights Business Solutions LLP. Touching Heights happened to be Jobishh’s parent company. Going by registration records publicly available on the website of the ministry of corporate affairs, Jobishh was only one entity in a network of companies and individuals running jobs scams.

One “designated partner” of Touching Heights, for example, is Akash Attre, who is also a “designated partner” of Qserv Business Solutions LLP. Qserv, in turn, owns an outsourcing company called Trounce Infotech and a jobs website called Quickjobzz.com, which is a recurring name in consumer complaints about job fraud. Attre is one of Trounce Infotech’s co-directors; the other is his wife,

Shruti Attre also used to be a “designated partner” of NowNaukri LLP, the corporate title of a jobs website company sued by Naukri.com for impersonation and cheating. Shruti was the lead accused in that case. Of the two current “designated partners” of NowNaukri LLP, one, Naveen Bisht Singh, is also a director of Ornatus Solutions; the other, Hemant Suri, was once a director of Trounce Infotech. He was arrested by Mumbai police in May for running a job racket.

Repeated requests for an interview with Akash Attre were declined by his office. “Mr Attre joined the board of Touching Heights a few months ago in the capacity of an investor,” said Charu Talwar, his executive assistant, “but he resigned within two months as the business deal couldn’t materialise.”

Speaking to Hindustan Times in July, the CEO of Touching Heights, Lovjil Mukund, denied that his call centre employees sell fake job offers: “Jobishh promises neither jobs nor interviews. We provide three major services: résumé preparation, social media content writing and career consultant support.” So why have people received calls from Jobishh asking them if they want a job and claiming to know of specific offers? “We just inform the candidates about openings which we come across on the internet that matches their profile,” he said.

“Jobishh is not a job portal,” Mukund stressed. So why did its website update job openings “across 41 industries” regularly? Mukund said the service was temporary.

In August, a month after Hindustan Times interviewed Mukund, Jobishh added a blinking red banner to its website saying that the website “will never” ask people to make payments into “someone’s personal account”; that its clients should not share their financial information “with anyone”; and that Jobishh cannot “guarantee any interview calls, job offers, or meetings with prospective employers”.

By the end of her first week at Ornatus, Neetu Khatri said she’d learned the truth about Jobishh. “It’s not a genuine company. They are scamming. I don’t know if they are providing these jobs and services… But we have to convince the customers to sign up.”

Like most youngsters who go through the same journey — from uploading their CV online to showing up at remote corners of the city — Khatri was slowly realising that if a job existed at the end of it at all, it must come with a catch.

ALWAYS ANOTHER CALL CENTRE

Conversations with four reputed lawyers and recent law enforcement activities all suggest that Jobishh-style operations break the law. “There may be some disclaimer or T&Cs somewhere on the website, but the fact that they are offering jobs from companies is a misrepresentation,” said Rahul Sahay, an advocate at Delhi high court. “There is an intention to cheat.”

Police departments across the country have taken action against jobs sites and call centres similar to Jobishh and Ornatus. In May, for instance, Delhi police arrested the two “masterminds” of Zeeobs.com, which called people promising nonexistent jobs for cash. They had made at least ₹30 lakh in four months.

In the first week of October, Jobishh and Quickjobzz, both owned by the same network of individuals, posted notices on their home pages announcing that they had “closed operations until further notice” and would be delivering services only to “existing customers”. Including NowNaukri, which closed in mid-2016, the network has shut down three jobs websites in just over a year, illustrating the fly-by-night nature of the fake-job industry.

Khatri quit Jobishh after just a month, and is currently looking for another job. Deepika Chadha, now back at college after a summer of unemployment, has given up any hope of a refund from Zenith Infotech.

On August 14, when Hindustan Times called the agency, a man answered who identified himself as HR Sameer. He said Zenith makes sure everyone who pays them for a job gets one somewhere.

What about Chadha and Riitu? “Someone in our team must have made a mistake,” he said before continuing in a familiar vein. “Do they still want to be placed? I have a call centre in Shadipur where I can send them.”

THE JOB ASPIRANTS OF TODAY ARE UNIQUELY VULNERABLE TO GETTING DUPED AS SCAMMERS HAVE REALISED THAT THE ACCESSIBILITY AND ANONYMITY OF THE WEB OFFERS THE PERFECT VEHICLE FOR DECEIT