Assam: 108 brokers arrested in drive against black marketing of Railway tickets in Guwahati

Railway Protection Force on February 12 arrested as many as 108 brokers in a raid which was conducted against ticket brokers involved in black marketing of railway tickets in Guwahati.

Railway Protection Force earlier have taken various steps to curb illegal purchase and sale of tickets.

Tickets with value worth more than Rs 31.66 lakh were recovered by the police.

The brokers were reportedly selling the tickets in black from April to December 2022.

The authorities have said that in view of the extra rush of passengers, this campaign against touts will continue so that the tickets are easily available to the passengers.

They have also requested to the railway passengers to buy rail travel tickets from the booking window, authorized website and authorized agents only and to not fall in the trap of ticket brokers.

In 2022, around 300 agents were arrested nationwide, for illegally cornering hundreds of thousands of tickets on major routes every day.

Agents affiliated to the gang used a software that allowed them to bypass not only security clearances like CAPTCHA that detects bots, but also the process of OTP generation and submission. This gave the gang’s agents an advantage of around 30 seconds over other travel agents and individual customers, allowing them to corner hundreds of thousands of tickets before others could even log-in.

Earlier on May, 2022, Guwahati: The Railway Protection Force (RPF) of Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) sleuths have busted a fake railway ticketing racket in lower Assam’s Kokrajhar and neighbouring West Bengal districts. Three persons were arrested in the operations.

During this raid 16 numbers of railway E-Tickets were recovered (both live & used E-Tickets) that worth more than Rs. 21,000 last week.

In one if the operations, a team of RPF team of Kokrajhar conducted a raid at a local shop located at Pratapkhata Bazar, Chilita, Kokrajhar and arrested a person. The team seized seven e-tickets worth more than Rs. 5 thousand along with a mobile phone from the shop.

 A case was booked under section 143 of the Railways Act in this regard against the arrested person.

Similarly, RPF of New Malda Junction, on information raided a travel agency named ‘DIGINET E-Ticket Shop’ located at Binnaguri market, Jalpaiguri and arrested the agency owner with eight railway E-Tickets worth around Rs. 16 thousand along with a mobile phone and a computer set.

In another incident, on same day, RPF team of Hasimara outpost acted upon information and conducted a raid at a shop named ‘R S InfoTech’ located at Hamiltonganj, Alipurduar. One live E-Ticket was recovered from the shop worth around Rs. 4 hundred along with a laptop, two mobile phones and cash.

The owners of both the shops of the above incidents were arrested and a case was registered under section 143 of the Railways Act in this regard.