A promise of work in Georgia, delivered through an Instagram Reel, has led investigators to a job fraud syndicate stretching from Himachal Pradesh to Punjab, with links to Armenia. Faridabad Police have arrested four men, all residents of Una and neighbouring Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar in Punjab, on charges of cheating people with false promises of overseas employment and work visas.
The accused, identified as Jagmohan Singh alias Jaggi, Harsh Kumar alias Harshu, Gagan Saini and Himalaya alias Harry, were arrested by the Cyber Police Station Central and have been sent on seven-day police remand. Investigators recovered five mobile phones from the group, two of which contained numbers registered in Armenia, a detail that has widened the scope of the inquiry considerably.
A pitch built for the scroll
The case originated with a complaint from Rahul, a resident of Faridabad’s New Baselwa Colony, who came across an Instagram Reel advertising jobs and work visas for Georgia. After expressing interest, he was allegedly assured of employment and travel arrangements, and transferred ₹50,000 to a bank account held by Gagan Saini. No visa or job placement followed, and Rahul approached the Cyber Police Station Central, where a case was registered on May 7 based on the alleged February fraud.
Investigators say the accused have admitted, during preliminary questioning, to involvement in roughly 20 to 25 similar cases, a figure police are now attempting to verify through the recovered phones and associated bank records. The pattern fits a wider trend investigators across India have flagged repeatedly this year, in which fraudulent recruitment operations exploit short-form video platforms to reach job seekers directly, bypassing the scrutiny that traditional consultancies or newspaper advertisements might invite.
The Una connection and an Armenian trail
The investigation traced part of the operation to an office allegedly opened by Jagmohan Singh and Harsh Kumar in Palika Bazaar, Una, functioning as a front for the purported overseas placement business. Police found that Harsh Kumar and Himalaya alias Harry had themselves previously worked in Armenia, and that the trio’s association formed after the two returned to India and reconnected with Jagmohan Singh while attempting to travel abroad again.
That personal history, investigators believe, gave the group enough familiarity with Armenian numbers and networks to lend their pitch a veneer of authenticity when dealing with prospective victims. The Armenian numbers recovered from the phones are now being examined for call records and contacts, with police trying to establish whether the syndicate had cross-border collaborators or was simply using foreign SIM cards to appear more credible and harder to trace.
Cases of Indians being lured abroad through social media job offers, only to find themselves trapped, defrauded or coerced into unrelated labour once they arrive, have drawn sustained attention from the Ministry of External Affairs over the past two years, particularly involving fraudulent placements routed through Southeast Asia. While the Faridabad case has so far surfaced as a financial fraud rather than a trafficking matter, investigators are treating the overseas-employment framing with particular caution given that pattern.
Tracing the money and the network
Gagan Saini’s bank account, which allegedly received the ₹50,000 from Rahul, was reportedly provided to him by Himalaya alias Harry, according to police. The transaction history is now under scrutiny to determine the total volume of money that passed through the account and whether funds were subsequently layered through other accounts, a common method used to frustrate recovery efforts and obscure the ultimate beneficiaries.
The five recovered phones are undergoing forensic examination for social media activity, message logs and other digital traces that could connect the four men to additional victims or unnamed associates. Police say the interrogation over the coming days will focus on identifying other bank accounts, social media handles and possible members of the network who have not yet been arrested.
Given the claimed scale of 20 to 25 prior incidents, investigators anticipate that more complainants may come forward once the case receives wider attention, particularly among those who paid processing fees for visas that never materialised. The Una office and the accused’s Armenian contacts remain focal points as police work to establish whether this was a self-contained operation or part of a larger racket exploiting India’s appetite for overseas work opportunities.
