69 FIRs but no arrest in Punjab fraud case

Jupinderjit Singh

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 29

Baljinder Singh and his wife Rupinder Kaur are repenting the moment they nursed the dream of trying to settle in Canada. Some years down the line, they are left licking their wounds after losing lakhs of rupees in the process. Life for them is an endless wait for justice as the Punjab Police continue to dither on arresting the accused, who duped them.

They are not the only victims in this case. The FIRs in this fraud case are piling up, but no earnest action is visible on part of the police. There are around 600 others victims of this “foreign job” fraud. Sixty-nine FIRs have already been lodged at different police stations in Mohali, while 85 other complaints were pending for registration.

“It is the death of our dream. There is no system in our country to catch hold of such companies while these are in business,” said Rupinder Kaur.  The case pertains to Worldtrek Education Consultants Private Limited Company and Creative Placements Consultants Private Limited Company. These firms opened offices in Mohali in 2012 and vanished by February 2013.

These firms offered “assured” jobs in two companies in Canada on work permit visa and collected about  Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh from each applicant.

As the police allegedly sat over the complainants claiming the accused were untraceable, some victims decided to go to the bottom of the case on their own. Using the Right to Information Act and by making persistent enquiries with banks where the accused had opened accounts, these persons came to know that the two companies had pocketed over Rs 10 crore by fleecing people.

As per the FIRs, people were duped by Satpal Singh and Ruby Sharma, managing directors of the two companies. The police say they were untraceable. The victims claim those persons were just dummies. Satpal they used to meet was a different person than the Satpal Singh as mentioned in the company’s documents.

Their addresses of Bathinda and Mansa, as mentioned in the records of these companies, also turned out to be fake. Through their friends in Canada, who checked addresses of the two companies in that country, victims came to know that those addresses didn’t exist.

Having lost their hard-earned money, these persons are now finding it difficult to meet their expenses. Baljinder Singh works as a private security guard. He and his wife Rupinder Kaur, who holds a nursing degree, said the police had not even registered an FIR on their complaint so far.

“These companies earned our trust by giving us post-dated cheques, in case they were unable to provide us jobs. The cheques bounced,” he said. He had taken Rs 2 lakh on loan by mortgaging his small ancestral house for making payment to the companies. “Now, we can hardly make both ends meet and are unable to repay the loan,” he said

Baljinder, Gurpreet Singh, Najam Singh, Fauja Singh, Hardev Singh, Shivenderjeet Singh and Hardev Singh said they had made endless rounds of various police stations, but to no avail.