26 Arrested in India's biggest ticketing scam, Top boss absconding in Dubai

The Indian Railways may have bustled the largest ticket booking gang yet, including a software engineering department in Dubai, IP addresses from Yugoslavia, and a complex corporate-like structure in India that involves a country manager, super-admins, lead-sellers, and more than 20,000 agents.

The Railway Protection Force (RPF), which had taken almost two months to get to the roots of the racket, named a certain Hamid Ashraf, who operates out of Dubai, as the mastermind of the group. Ashraf was arrested in a ticketing scam at Gonda in UP in 2016 and investigators believe he was also involved in a bomb blast in UP in 2019.

The RPF has arrested 26 people in just the past few weeks, including India's leader of the group, named as Ghulam Mustafa, who was taken from Bangalore on January 19. The head of the western region of the group, Deepal Saha alias Danny Saha, was nabbed onboard Paschim Express in Borivali on January 22 while he was trying to flee to Gujarat.

According to a report submitted by the RPF with its Director-General Arun Kumar, in just the first 40 seconds of the online booking launch, the gang cornered an average of 50% of the tickets sold in the country on any given day. This was done using software that allowed the 20,000 agents 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. The software – a new version of which was generated every day to escape Indian Railway's cyber vigilance – also helped agents generate 500 different IPs on a single computer.

Every morning, Ashraf's team would send the new program to Mustafa who would send it to 30 super-admins in turn. The super-admins would then communicate with 300 lead-sellers, who were under their command of over 20,000 agents.

A confirmed train ticket is extremely hard to come by in India, especially in smaller towns. A confirmed ticket on an important route can earn a premium of Rs 200 to Rs 500. During the festival season, there are long queues at ticket windows. Even Tatkal tickets, for which the railways charge a hefty premium, are nearly impossible to get at a ticket window. One of the main reasons for this is gangs like Ashraf's that corner tickets in bulk online, creating a shortage.

An officer says that India's leader of the group, Mustafa, is an international businessman with connections in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Indonesia, and Nepal. He specializes also in the creation of fake Aadhar cards.

A senior RPF officer who did not wish to be identified said the investigators are now searching for a gang member known only as Guruji, who appears to be managing the finances of the group. Research has shown that Guruji uses a Yugoslav number and a virtual private network (VPN). "Recently, through a bank transfer, Guruji got Rs 13 lakh from Mustafa," the officer said