Placement agency involved in cheating busted, one held

NEW DELHI: Hiring a domestic help from a placement agency is considered to be the safest option, as people believe that maids and agencies are the most trustworthy source.

However, in a major case of deception, South West Delhi police on Wednesday busted a placement agency for housemaids who used to cheat their clients with the connivance of maids and servants.

Police arrested 32-year-old Ranjeet Rawat, a resident of east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar-iii, who cheated several people on the pretext of providing domestic help, maid and servants. Rawat, a graduate, is a native of Chamoli, Uttarakhand.

Explaining the modus operandi, police said that the housemaids assigned by the agency used to work at a des- ignated place for some days and then would to go missing giving some random excuse.

When the homeowner or employer would call the maid’s number, they would find it to be switched off.

When they would call the placement agency, they would be again greeted by switched off phones.

Soon, they would realise that they have been robbed of the Rs 30,000-35,000 they had paid to the agency as an advance for the maid.

The agency busted by cops duped at least 20 people in the last year, as they kept on changing addresses and stopped picking up a frantic call from homeowners.

Several complaints were registered against the agency in the last couple of months in Mohammadpur Village at RK Puram police station, said a police official.

A team led by ATO Arvind Sharma, and formed under supervision of ACP Satish Kain, cracked the fraud.

The police team had received a tip-off about a agency located in Kotla Mubarakpur and a raid was conducted there. Rawat, the owner of the company, was arrested under section 420 of the IPC.

“During interrogation, he disclosed that he has been working in this field for 10 years and had made links with several people, who arranged male and female maids belonging to poor background from states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Nepal. He started his own placement consultancy in 2017 and advertised it with a popular directory app to receive a query of interested clients,” DCP (South West) Devendar Arya said.