Fake job agents in Mumbai duped several hundred gullible job seekers in tune of crores of rupees for providing 'permanent' job in Air Asia, which will yet to launch in operations in India.
A quick survey of the bunch of classified advertisement pages that come with the Sunday newspaper can be really reassuring in these inflation-infested times. Firstly, they seem to say that there are more jobs in the city than there are autos in Mumbai.
Then they tell you that there are people willing to pay you up to 45,000 rupees to ‘post letters’. Or that you deserve to make thousands of rupees sitting at home watching TV all day.
Assuming that these advertisements, which are like Sunday rituals in most mainstream newspapers, are not placed for free. And they make regular appearances only because there are people who respond to them. So, it’s not difficult to believe that dozens of people fell for an advertisement run on papers asking people to apply for jobs in Air Asia.
Dozens of people might have been duped by these scam advertisers, INN called up the number mentioned on the paper. The phone was readily answered within 2-3 rings. A gentleman, who identified himself as Mahesh Chavan received the call. Pretending to be a prospective applicant, we enquired about the ‘employment opportunity’. The conversation went thus:
INN reporter: Hi, I saw an advertisement on today’s paper…
Mahesh: Which paper? When did you see this?
INN reporter: Saw it today on Mumbai Mirror. It is about employment in Air Asia…
Mahesh: Yes, we are hiring for Air Asia. What do you do, what have you studied?
INN reporter: I completed graduation, currently unemployed.
Mahesh: Okay, come with Rs 35,000 tomorrow. After you deposit the money with us, we will train you and you will start working.
INN reporter: What is the Rs 35,000 for?
Mahesh: For training. We will train you for three days at the international airport. Then you will start working. You can start working whenever you want to. The salary will be Rs 30,000 per month and there will be other perks.
INN reporter: What will be this job? And where will I have to pay the money?
Mahesh: I will sms you the address. You have to pay the money there and then go to the Andheri airport where the training will start.
For someone who has run some background research, it is not too difficult to suspect that the man might be lying. Mumbai resident Vijay Nallawala, who had called up the same number, was greeted by a woman who said she was with the HR department. The lady in question had asked him to pay Rs 1.2 lakh and then proceed to the Sahara airport for training, much like Chavan did with us.
In this case, Chavan identified himself as managing a recruitment agency on behalf of Air Asia. Given that the call was made for investigative purposes, it wasn’t difficult to figure out the several loopholes that can expose such a fake agent.
First, he doesn’t ask you details about qualification, age, experience, residence etc. Then he offers a ‘permanent job’ within a week or any time the applicant fancies. He tells you about your pay package without verifying your details and then he asks you to pay for ‘training’ – not at a corporate office, but a random place whose address will be messaged to you.
Run a Google search for ‘job seekers in india duped’, and the search engine, like usual, will throw up more than a lakh results. What sets this apart from other searches is probably the fact that the first dozen pages thrown up in the search has links to scores of cases where job seekers have been duped in India and each link leads to a different incident.
Given that not everyone who reads a newspaper is a discerning reader, it is easy to see how some might fall prey to the trap. The man who we called sounded reassuring, said it’s okay if you have no experience because they will provide ‘proper training’, and promised a salary that is hard to stake claim to by a inexperienced graduate with no great qualifications. When frustration is met with promises like these, people would want to believe in miracles.
Add to this, the fact that there aren’t many government or private agencies that can be completely trusted for job search purposes. All those who have signed up for jobs portals in India have been tempted to unsubscribe at some point or the other thanks to irrelevant mails, spam mails, pestering promotional mails and fraudulent offers. The way to get rid of all that, of course, is paying a good bit of money to the portal.
Also, it isn’t very difficult to pretend to be a convincing placement agency.
It doesn’t take much to set up a website that makes tall claims and reassure people of their authenticity. In fact, the way in which placement agencies attract prospective customers is questionable. “There have been several instances when I have turned up for a walk-in for a specific job to be told to enroll with the concerned agency who will then find me a job.
All these ‘agencies’ advertise in newspapers with fake job descriptions to get people to pay enrollment fees and sign up. They send dozens of people for interviews once in a blue moon and thne tell you it’s not their fault if you didn’t make it.
“There’s a raging business opportunity there you see,” says Debraj Ghosh, a hardware professional now employed with an MNC. Unfortunately, there’s no regulatory body or watchdog that these agencies need affiliation too or worry about.
In an article published just two days back, Times of India reported that the rate of unemployment in urban India has risen by 3 percent. According to data available from 2012, India’s unemployment rate stood at 9.9 percent. The Hindu Businessline reported that the ILO had predicted that 73 million people will be jobless worldwide by the end of this year. Their appropriation of the problem probably helps put this blind rush for any job advertised on papers in perspective.
According to the report: Noting that ‘stable and quality employment’ was especially lacking in developing regions where poverty was a major issue, the report said, “In India there is evidence that youth unemployment rates are higher for families with incomes over the $1.25 poverty rate than for those with incomes under this poverty line.”
Flagging the problem of ‘skills mismatch’, it says, “in developing countries such as India, as much as two-thirds of young workers receive below average wages and are engaged in work for which they are either over-qualified or under-qualified”.
“Over-education and over-skilling co-exist with under-education and under-skilling… Such a mismatch makes solutions to the youth employment crisis more difficult to find,” says the report.
Winding queues in front of government employment exchanges, ‘employment wanted’ columns running into pages in newspapers can probably explain why a lot of people will be willing to pay the Rs 35,000 to Mahesh in a wild gamble.
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