Police in Ghaziabad have arrested two more members of an organised gang allegedly involved in defrauding job seekers with promises of overseas employment, identified as Mangeram alias Anuj Kumar and Ranveer, both residents of Deoband in Saharanpur district. According to investigators, the network allegedly cheated more than 200 job seekers by collecting large sums of money on the pretext of arranging jobs abroad, with the latest raid recovering 64 passports, ₹1.86 lakh in cash, a laptop, computers and several other documents.
The case originated on March 21, when Akash Walia, a resident of Kaushambi, lodged a complaint alleging that Usman Khan, who allegedly operated an office under the name Al-Noor Travel from Mahalakshmi Tower in Vaishali Sector-4, had promised to arrange overseas employment and collected approximately ₹1.80 lakh from him. Police allege neither the promised job nor a refund ever materialised, prompting the registration of a criminal case that has since unravelled into a considerably larger investigation.
A Scam Discovered Only at the Airport Gate
The method allegedly used by the gang followed a pattern designed to delay detection until it was too late for victims to act. Investigators allege that after collecting large sums from job seekers, the gang supplied them with forged visas, fake airline tickets and counterfeit appointment letters, documents convincing enough that victims reportedly discovered the fraud only after arriving at the airport ready to travel abroad, the very last point at which recourse becomes practically impossible.
Compounding the difficulty of tracking the network, police allege that after defrauding a batch of victims, the accused would shut down their office, relocate to a new address and resume the same fraudulent activities under a different setup, a rotating-storefront model that allowed the operation to keep collecting from new victims while evading the accumulating complaints against its previous identity. Earlier in the investigation, police had arrested Usman Khan and Saif Islam alias Abdullah Ansari, whose interrogation and subsequent technical analysis led investigators to Mangeram and Ranveer. According to investigators, the accused disclosed during questioning that several other individuals were also involved in the operation, and efforts are underway to identify and apprehend them. The seized electronic devices and records are now being subjected to forensic and technical examination to identify additional victims, trace financial transactions and determine the full extent of the alleged operation.
A Fraud Ecosystem the Government Has Long Struggled to Contain
The Ghaziabad case is not an isolated criminal enterprise but a visible fragment of a considerably larger, chronically under-regulated ecosystem. Under the Emigration Act, 1983, no person or agency can legally function as a Recruiting Agent without a valid licence issued by the Protector General of Emigrants, and licensed agents are legally barred from collecting more than Rs 30,000 plus GST in service charges from any single applicant. In practice, both requirements are widely and openly flouted.
The scale of the enforcement gap is considerable. The Ministry of External Affairs told Parliament that as of December 2025, a total of 3,505 unregistered agents across the country had been notified on the government’s eMigrate portal for involvement in illegal recruitment activities. Yet that official figure likely captures only a fraction of the true scale of the problem: independent estimates have placed the number of unregulated subagents operating beneath India’s roughly 2,000 government-certified recruiting agencies at close to 100,000 as of 2021, a figure widely believed to have grown further since, driven in part by rising unemployment. Government advisories have separately acknowledged a huge rise in the number of overseas job seekers being cheated by unregistered agents through fake job offers and overcharging in the range of Rs 2 to 5 lakh, a range that aligns closely with the roughly Rs 1.80 lakh the Ghaziabad complainant alleges he paid.
Why the System Struggles to Protect Job Seekers Before It Is Too Late
Part of the structural difficulty lies in how enforcement is triggered. Government action against illegal agents is typically reactive rather than preventive: cases are referred to state police for investigation only after a complaint is filed by an aggrieved emigrant or their family, by which point the money has usually already changed hands and, in the worst cases, victims have already reached a foreign airport only to discover their documents are worthless. Advocates working on migrant welfare have pointed out that responsibility for this gap extends beyond the illegal agents themselves to the broader regulatory apparatus that has historically been slow to move against the sprawling informal networks operating beneath licensed agencies.
Experts at the Future Crime Research Foundation, commenting on cases of this kind, said overseas employment scams frequently involve fraudsters luring job seekers with promises of high salaries, quick visa approvals and guaranteed placements. They advised applicants to verify the credentials, government registration and licence of any recruitment agency, using the government’s official emigrate.gov.in portal to cross-check an agent’s status, and to independently confirm the authenticity of employers, visas, appointment letters and travel documents through official channels before making any payment. For the more than 200 alleged victims of the Ghaziabad network, and for the far larger population of Indian job seekers pursuing opportunities abroad through an ecosystem where illegal subagents still vastly outnumber licensed ones, that verification step remains the only meaningful safeguard standing between a legitimate opportunity and a scam that reveals itself only at the boarding gate.
