Man fools travel portals, booked 1500 air tickets for free- made over 2 crores

Report By Shivani Baddi | Christ College Student Bengaluru | Last Updated at May 19 2019

Madhya Pradesh: Rajpratab Parmar, a man from Madhya Pradesh has managed to fool several travel portals along with two of his relatives by booking 1500 air tickets without paying anything.

He made 2 crores over 2 years. However, he was arrested a few days ago.

Parmar apparently discovered a loophole in the payment gateway system of 4 portals, around 2 years ago and worked on his plan and reached out to various travel agencies in the country.

He gave them an 80% discount on air tickets.

As per the information obtained from the investigation, Parmar would take travel bookings from travel agents. While filing in the traveler’s details online, he would enter some random mobile numbers and email ID.

By doing this, the traveler would not receive any kind of alert via SMS or email. After this Parmar would enter his card details and do the transactions till he had to select between the submit and cancel payment options. He would then click on cancel and press escape several times, which would freeze the payment page.

He, then, would tinker with the URL and write ‘Success’ in the URL to show that he had clicked on submit.

After this he would copy-paste the link to another tab and press the ‘enter’ button. This way he made the system think that the payment has been processed and authorized.

Ultimately, the tickets would generate without him paying a single rupee.

His fraud was noticed by a Mumbai based man while he was booking a ticket for himself.

When he took a print out of the ticket, he noticed the cell phone number and email ID that were mentioned on his ticket were not his and the amount he paid for the ticket as compared to what was mentioned on the ticket were completely different. He was very surprised by this.

He decided to make a written complaint to unit 7 of Mumbai Crime branch. After a little investigation, the officers learned about the scam and arrested Parmar as soon as they could.

The investigation team also suspects the involvement of some travel agents, although it has not been confirmed yet and the investigation is in process.

Parmar is now arrested and behind the bars, along with his two relatives involved in the scam.