New Delhi, Nov 28 (PTI) The Delhi Police has arrested four people, including a woman, for allegedly extorting and cheating job aspirants on the pretext of providing work from home opportunities through fake portals, officials said on Sunday.

Police received complaints alleging that three websites were engaged in cheating people by promising them to offer work from home jobs and give them a task which was impossible to complete. The accused would then extort money by threatening the people to drag them to courts for not completing the work, a senior police officer said.

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The accused were identified as R Kumar (23), M Singh (25), and T Kumar (25), all residents of Mohan Garden, and a 23-year-old woman from Mayapuri, they said.

During inquiry, a search on National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP) was conducted regarding similar complaints all over India and it was revealed that there were more than 60 complaints lodged by different victims with similar allegations, the officer said.

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Technical inquiry revealed that the accused were operating from Delhi/NCR. Later, the four accused were apprehended, said K P S Malhotra, Deputy Commissioner of Police in the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit.

During interrogation, the accused disclosed that after creating the alleged websites, they started to call the unemployed people for data entry jobs. The resume filling jobs would seem alluring to the victims, but they failed to complete it in the given time due to hefty data provided by the accused, the DCP said.

Thereafter, the accused started to call the victims and extorted money by threatening them to drag in courts for not completing the task, police said.

The gang collected resumes of people looking for employment from home such as data entry work. The fraudsters made the hired people sign legal agreements with a penalty clause if they failed to meet the work deadlines, police said.

The fake employers then gave the candidates impossible tasks to complete. They then extorted large amounts as a penalty for their failure to submit the job work within the time, police said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)