Illegal rly e-ticket booking racket busted, two held

Surat: Two people including an IRCTC agent hacked into the railway e-booking platform and made hundreds of tatkal tickets in Surat, the racket being busted in a joint raid by the Western Railway’s Mumbai vigilance team and Surat police.
The arrested duo - Rajesh Mittal (55) and Krupa Patel (24) - made 652 tickets and earned Rs 16.17 lakh by hacking the website using illegal software named Gadar and Nexus that were found in the laptops.The raid was conducted in a flat in the Citylight area.
When the technical team checked the software log, they found that 973 robot-generated user ids and passwords were used to book the tickets that Mittal sold for Rs 600 to Rs 900 apiece.
According to details, Mittal is an authorized agent of IRCTC for ticket booking. The Mumbai vigilance team got a tip-off that Mittal was booking tatkal tickets by hacking the website. Using the software, he would log in to the site without verifying his details and bypassing the security process.
The illegal softwares enable auto-filling details, like source and destination, journey date, train numbers, coach details and payment method, in IRCTC forms and completing the online booking within a few seconds.
On Jun 25, WR vigilance inspectors Sanjay Sharma, Sandip Golatkar, Bhavik Dwivedi, and his team members raided the apartment jointly with Umra police and the Railway Protection Force (RPF).
When they went to the flat, a woman identifying herself as Krupa Patel opened the door. She told the team that her boss was working in the bedroom. They found Mittal working on six laptops, and making journey-cum-reservation tickets (JCRT). They called the WR signal and communication department in Mumbai and two more officials - Anil Rajput and Rajiv Katarkar - to Surat.
They found 54 live JCRT tickets for which Mittal charged a total of Rs 1.51 lakh. The vigilance team blocked all 54 tickets before the journeys commenced using them.
When laptops were checked, it was found that Mittal booked total 598 tickets worth Rs 14.66 lakhs in May-Jun 2024. The vigilance team found many card details and other payment details from the laptops.
The duo were handed over to the Umra police that arrested by on the complaint registered by vigilance inspector Sanjay Sharma. They were booked for cheating and other relevant sections of the IP and the Information Technology Act.