Bengaluru: Couple hold IT job fair, swindle 2,000 aspirants

BENGALURU: The Basavanagudi police arrested a 40-year-old software engineer who along with his wife had organised a fake IT job fair and duped over 2,000 unemployed graduates promising them jobs. The accused, Santana Gopalan from Chennai, and working in the IT cell of a luxury car company, had devised the plan to make quick money by organising the fake job fair.

Santana hosted the job fair on the campus of APS Commerce College and hired the space for a mere Rs 10,000. The advertisement for the job fair claimed that top IT companies were participating and hiring engineering and business management graduates.

Over 2,000 unemployed graduates from Pune, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh attended the fair. Gopalan and his wife Ambika had collected Rs 100 from each candidate as entry fee, while Gopalan had also hired a few people to conduct interviews to hoodwink the job aspirants, the police said.

But Gopalan’s luck ran out when one of the candidates, who suspected something amiss, alerted the police, who raided the place and arrested the couple. During the interrogation, Gopalan confessed that he got the idea of duping unemployed youth after he visited a job fair in the city two months ago. “He tried to justify saying he only took Rs 100 per student,” Basavanagudi Inspector S.D. Shashidhar said. The police recovered '24,400 in cash from the accused and are investigating further.