Mihir Mishra, Pranav Mukul.
In February last year, a travel agent from Chandigarh dialed Air India’s customer care center, asking for details about the Kathmandu flight. With this call, he becomes a part of a big racket and also gets his loss of about 50 lakh rupees. This racket was running through a two decade old BPO company named IGT Solutions. Air India had assigned the responsibility of handling the customer care center to IGT Solutions. This fraud of getting people to travel without paying the airline was going on, when the country came under the grip of the second wave of COVID and a big disclosure was made.
Last February, a travel agent was booking tickets for a flight to Kathmandu. He called the customer care number of Air India registered in Gurugram. Requested ticket related information. The person who picked up the call of the travel agent told that he would be called back by the assistant officer. Soon the agent gets a call from a person who claims to be an Air India representative and wants to help.
After a while the agent again got a call from the same representative. This time he had an offer. The agent said, “The man claimed to be from Air India and asked me how much it cost for a ticket to Kathmandu. When I told him the amount, he told me to give me the same ticket for Rs 10,000 less.”
The agent further added, “I spoke to my senior travel agent friends. He advised me to take this offer. But I should give money only when the passenger travels on that ticket. The alleged Air India representative accepted the agent’s condition and booked the ticket and sent it. The agent’s client traveled to Kathmandu without any hassle. After this, the said representative of Air India was given the fixed amount.
The agent says, “We followed this approach for the next 15 days. Paid only after the trip is over. Now since that person never failed, I decided to pay at the time of booking. Then other travel agents apart from me also started booking tickets through that person.
This continued till India was hit by the second wave of COVID in May 2021. The second wave once again affected the travel plans of the people. People started canceling tickets. Some of the agent’s customers canceled tickets until their departure to Canada in anticipation of a refund. But the agent did not get the refund so that he could return it to his customers. Other travel agents also found themselves in this trap. The agent says, “To date, about 60 tickets (mostly for Canada) have a total refund outstanding of Rs 52 lakh. …and that’s all mine. There are many others like me.”
Meanwhile, Air India also found a discrepancy in the record. He was not getting money for the tickets booked by IGT Solutions. When the investigation was done, it was found that the tickets were being booked by the company but this work was not being done through the company’s system. Some outsider was hacking the entire system and issuing tickets for free.
An Air India official told The Indian Express, “The tickets issued were genuine but were not paid to the airline. Usually this kind of problem occurs. But then it was resolved in a few days, weeks or months. But when this problem persisted for a long time, we contacted IGT Solutions and asked them to look into the matter.”
Last month, IGT Solutions lodged an FIR against the unknown at Cyber Crime Police Station, Gurugram. “Many tickets were booked through Air India’s system but those tickets were not paid to the airline,” the FIR said.
The company alleges that “these tickets were booked using the ‘log-in ID and password’ of the IGT employees. While these employees were not authorized or trained to issue tickets. In many cases, those employees were not even in the shift at the time of making such tickets.
IGT Solutions did not respond to queries sent by The Indian Express in this regard. IGT Solutions, formerly InterGlobe Technologies, was then owned by Rahul Bhatia, the billionaire promoter of budget airline IndiGo. In the year 2019, the company was acquired by AION Capital.
In response to queries sent by the Indian Express, an Air India spokesperson has denied the involvement of its employees in the fake ticket booking. He has said, “As we know, IGT has registered an FIR against unknown persons and not against any employee of Air India. An error has been observed. IGT is following the procedure.”