Over a year after allegedly defrauding job aspirants in 12 cases in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka, a 30-year-old woman was arrested by the Cyberabad police on Monday, October 14. Reshma was arrested in Karnataka’s Kalaburagi in connection with two cases registered in Telangana, where she defrauded several individuals by promising them jobs in multi-national corporations such as Cognizant and IBM.
Reshma, along with her ex-husband Mohammed Ali and two other men, allegedly purchased fake SIM cards and used several email addresses as a means to approach and cheat people who wanted a job in the information technology (IT) field.
In the first case, Reshma cheated a 34-year-old MBA graduate Vanaja, residing in Hyderabad’s Miyapur, by posing as a senior Human Resources (HR) manager working for Cognizant. After Vanaja mentioned that three of her friends were looking for jobs at the time, Reshma referred her to ‘another Cognizant employee named Supreethi’. In reality, Supreethi was a pseudonym for Reshma who was posing as a separate individual. After the students sent their resumes and were seemingly hired by Cognizant, Supreethi stated that money had to be paid for placing the students. Vanaja collected a total of Rs 58.75 lakh and sent it to Supreethi.
In the second case, T Sai Kumar, a resident of Kukatpally in Hyderabad, received a phone call from a ‘Swapna’ (another of Reshma’s aliases) regarding placements at the IBM corporation for the job of a Senior DevOps Engineer role. Swapna initially asked for a payment of Rs 1.5 lakh, to which Sai Kumar agreed, provided that he received the offer letter first.
Swapna then asked for a fee of Rs 10,000 to schedule an IBM interview with Sai Kumar and asked him to send a scanned copy of his Aadhar Card. After Sai Kumar and eight others paid Rs 10.5 lakh in total, Swapna kept delaying the placement and did not return the money.
“Swapna told me that she got my number from an acquaintance named Gangadhar. She said she was involved in vendorship for IBM and was working as an intermediary to help IBM with hiring. I ended up paying Rs 10.5 lakh in total as I was also helping 7-8 other people who were looking for jobs,” Sai Kumar told TNM.
A native of Kadapa, Sai Kumar added that his placement was delayed continually as Swapna claimed that they were waiting for laptops to be sent to the candidates. “I snapped at this point. How long does it take to arrange laptops? It was at this point that I approached the police,” he said.
A case was registered under Sections 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 467 (forgery), and 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating) under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), read along with Section 66D (punishment for cheating by personation using a computer resource) of the Information Technology Act.