Several cheated in Canada job permit, visa fraud
The operator allegedly enticed individuals by promising work permits and visas for countries including Canada, collected substantial sums of money, and then disappeared overnight after shutting down the office.
Sanjay Lathiya, 30, a resident of Tagdi village in Bhavnagar, came across the company's advertisement offering visa and work permit services on Instagram in August 2024. He followed the page and contacted the number provided.
Jenil Prajapati, who answered the call, instructed Sanjay to bring his original documents and passport to their office. At the office, Sanjay met Jenil and his partners, Ankita Mistry and Rajesh Shah.
They informed him that the complete process — including the visa, air ticket, work permit, and medical expenses — for Canada would cost Rs 25 lakh. They collected his passport and documents.
On Jenil's instructions, Sanjay initially paid Rs 5 lakh and later a total of Rs 17 lakh in installments for the visa process.
In March 2025, Jenil and his partners sent a letter stating that a job letter would soon arrive at their office.
The letter also mentioned a cashier position in Canada with a wage of 32 dollars per hour but did not specify the name of the company.
Suddenly, Jenil and his partners stopped responding to calls. Sanjay traveled to Surat and visited the Vesu office, only to discover that many pwoplw had been defrauded in the name of foreign work permits and visas, and the office had been shut down.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Economic Times
26 minutes ago
- Economic Times
Indian biscuits, shampoos & poha go global: FMCG exports outpace domestic sales for HUL, Dabur and others
Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Popular in Cons. Products Kolkata: Smartphones may have sizzled their way to become the country's largest exported goods in the last fiscal year, but Indiamade daily use consumer goods such as biscuits, noodles, packaged gram flour, soaps and shampoos are also rapidly making inroads into global shelves. Top fast-moving consumer goods companies like Hindustan Unilever (HUL), ITC Dabur and AWL Agri Business (formerly Adani Wilmar) have reported faster growth in their export revenue compared with local sales in the past two fiscal international business accounts for only 3% of the turnover for some like HUL due to their very large domestic operations, it brings more than 20% of the revenue for companies such as Dabur, Emami and Marico. Unilever India Exports Ltd, HUL's wholly owned subsidiary for exports to other Unilever companies globally, posted an 8% increase in sales at Rs 1,258 crore in the last financial year ended March 31, according to HUL's annual report. Its net profit rose 14% to Rs 91 total sales, meanwhile, grew at a tepid pace of 2%, weighed by weak domestic company attributed the export growth to products in skin care, lifestyle nutrition, hair care and personal wash, driven by brands like Dove, Horlicks, Vaseline, Pears, Bru, Sunsilk, Glow and Lovely, Pond's, Lakme and Lifebuoy. It's not just basmati rice, traditionally a top commodity for exports from India, which is in high demand, said Angshu Mallick, chief executive at AWL Agri Business, India's largest packaged edible oil company. Mustard and sunflower oil, atta, besan (gram flour), soya nuggets and poha (flattened rice) all are seeing strong demand in foreign markets, he said.'We are just scratching the surface. The proliferation of Indian restaurants and popularity of Indian cuisines in the West is driving the exports. And it's not just the Indian diaspora but even the local people (in foreign markets) are buying these,' said Mallick, predicting that exports could rise 50-80% this fiscal demand is strong, a push from the government through export-focussed programmes like production-linked incentive schemes (PLI) for the food processing industry and millet-based products are also helping boost shipments, industry executives said. The government in December said it had selected 73 companies for benefits under the PLI scheme for marketing Indianbranded food products in global said in its latest annual report that its branded export business grew threefold in the past three years to cross Rs 250 crore in FY25. Godrej Consumer Products said in an investor presentation that the operating margin of its international business expanded to 17% in FY25 from 10% two years told analysts recently that its export business is scaling up fast and it posted 14% growth in constant currency terms (excluding the impact of currency movements) in FY25, compared with overall growth of 12%. At Dabur, exports grew 17% against a 1.3% expansion in consolidated revenue. ITC Ltd said in its latest annual report that the company is seeing 'green shoots' in exports of biscuits, noodles and snacks while its Aashirvaad Atta is already the market leader in several countries. 'ITC is also exploring strategic opportunities in proximal markets as a potential vector of growth going forward,' it a bulk of ITC's foreign exchange earnings from export is still driven by agri-commodities export revenue rose 7% to Rs 7,708 crore in FY25 — its FMCG export is set to become the next growth driver. The firm said its FMCG products are now sold in over 70 countries. Exports of other consumer goods from apparel, jewellery and consumer electronics to automobiles have also grown last fiscal year.
Economic Times
26 minutes ago
- Economic Times
How a digital drug dealer went about business quietly with a postal plan
A multi-million narcotics marketplace was built on darknet, with drugs delivered via postal services, payments in crypto. Kochi: Edison Babu's neighbours in Muvattupuzha knew him as the quiet engineer who had returned home during the 35-year-old former auto industry professional seemed to lead an unremarkable life in this sleepy Kerala suburb, occasionally visiting the local post office with packages: nothing unusual for someone running what appeared to be a small online business. What they didn't know was that their mild-mannered neighbour had built India's most sophisticated darknet drug empire, one that relied heavily on the very government postal service that was meant to serve the community. In a massive operation codenamed 'MELON' last week, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) arrested Babu, revealing him as the mastermind behind 'Ketamelon', India's only level-4 darknet vendor — a top-tier status that made him the country's digital drug case exposes a striking paradox: the same government infrastructure built to connect citizens and deliver legitimate goods has become the primary highway for India's most prolific online drug dealers. Authorities seized 1,127 LSD blots, 131.66 grams of ketamine and Rs 70 lakh worth of cryptocurrency from Babu's operation, which had distributed over 600 drug shipments across India in just 18 months. The modern darknet drug trade operates like a twisted version of legitimate e-commerce, complete with customer service ratings, bulk discounts and next-day 'Ketamelon' operation exemplified this new breed of digital drug dealing, where vendors are rated on a scale of 1 to 5 stars based on their potency of drugs sold and customer service with level-4 status representing the criminal equivalent of Amazon sourced large quantities of synthetic drugs through international vendors, primarily from UK-based supplier 'Gunga Din', believed to be linked to the notorious global LSD cartel 'Dr Seuss'— reputedly the world's largest LSD distributor. Once the drugs arrived through international couriers at places like Kochi Foreign Post Office, Babu would repackage them into smaller quantities and dispatch them across India using the country's postal technical sophistication was impressive. During raids, authorities confiscated a pen drive containing TAILS OS, an operating system maintaining privacy and anonymity while browsing the internet, along with multiple cryptocurrency wallets, hard disks with incriminating documents and a hardware were all Babu needed to build his multi-million marketplace of drugs on the darknet. The darknet, despite its ominous name, is simply the regular internet accessed through browsers like Tor that mask users' identities. No special skills or underground connections are required for this. Anyone can download Tor browser and access these hidden marketplaces in minutes, making the barrier to entry surprisingly low for both buyers and sellers. Payments flowed through cryptocurrency channels, with Monero serving as the new cash of the digital drug popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin don't directly reveal the user's real-world identity but, with enough information, it's possible to link transactions back to a person. Meanwhile, Monero is designed to obscure transaction details like sender, receiver and transaction amounts. Think of bit-coin like a 10-year old note on the back of which everyone who owned it previously is marked. In contrast, every unit of Monero is indistinguishable from every other time you spend a Monero, there are other decoys being spent, and all you know is that you are one of the many who spent the money. The receiver's Monero account does not appear on the blockchain; a one-ti-me-use address is what gets put on the blockchain, so the receiver's anonymity is also protected. The amount that gets sent is also confidential. The end result is that Mo-nero coins have no memory, the polar opposite of fiat the digital trade offers near-perfect anonymity to both sellers and buyers, the NCB has learned to exploit the inevitable friction points where the virtual world meets physical reality. 'Though you are present in the darknet and do all your activities, you will have a bank account which is linked to your crypto account. So the traces are always present in the surface world,' said a senior NCB official. The agency can track packages to their sources, though with limited success so far, but has discovered that these tech-savvy dealers eventually must interface with the outside world — whether for collecting money or arranging to the official, the typical journey of these vendors follows a predictable pattern: 'Most of these people who become vendors in the darknet are those who start their life as crypto traders. They pass out of college, start doing crypto trading, see some quick money, make some losses. Then probably they are a little bit addicted to drugs. Then they think, okay, better than crypto.' The official noted that most vendors are also users, with 'addiction always there. At least they used to take hydro weed or something'. While Kerala typically sees under 1,000 LSD blotters seized annually, Edison alone was allegedly selling close to 10,000 each month — each priced between Rs 2,500 and Rs 4,000, generating substantial monthly revenues that flowed seamlessly through cryptocurrency arrest represents the culmination of three-year crackdown that has systematically dismantled India's major darknet operations, each with names that sound more like tech startups than criminal enterprises. The pattern reveals both the scope of the problem and the peculiar creativity of digital drug 2023, the NCB struck twice, taking down 'Rambada cartel' and 'Tile shop'— two separate vendor operations that had established significant customer bases across Indian cities. The cases followed similar patterns: tech-savvy operators using cryptocurrency, sourcing from international suppliers and distributing through postal 2024, NCB brought down the operator behind 'Hare Krishna', a vendor whose religious-sounding moniker masked a sophisticated distribution network. A separate case in Salem that year netted another major operator, bringing the total to four major busts in three to the senior NCB official, that criminals needed such attractive names to draw customers itself shows how competitive the darknet marketplace has become. The NCB's success in the-se cases stems partly from their techni-cal evidence gathering. As the official explained, 'The technical evidence which we had been able to gather and put on record before the court is very strong. This is the reason why, though the period of incarceration is more than a year, none of them have been able to come out on bail.' The geographic pattern is telling: operations span from Kerala to Gurgaon, with 'Kerala, Bengaluru and Gurga-on becoming hotspots where these people get into crypto trading and also get lu-red into darknet and drug markets'. The common thread is India's IT-enabled ser-vices hubs, where 'the number of people who are having crypto accounts and crypto wallets will be very high'. Most arrests follow a similar investigative trail: months of surveillance, intercepted packages and raids that uncover sophisticated digital infrastructures. In the earlier 'Zambada' case — named after a Mexican cartel — the NCB arrested 14 people and sei-zed 29,013 LSD blots, 472 grams of MDMA and Rs 51.38 lakh in cash, revealing the scale these operations can of the most striking aspects of India's darknet drug trade isn't its digital sophistication — it's its reliance on decidedly analogue government infrastructure. India Post, the country's sprawling postal network designed to connect remote villages with urban centres, has inadvertently become the logistics backbone for illegal drug vulnerability is both systemic and shocking. As the senior NCB official bluntly acknowledged: 'The major cause of concern is the parcels which are going inside India. So once the contraband somehow enters into India, there is virtually no SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) in place for these courier and post office persons to do any scan or KYC check. Say, for example, a person is sending a parcel from Kochi to Delhi, absolutely, he can send anything. He can also send a pistol.'This creates an absurd theatre where the same postal workers who deliver government benefits like pensions, family letters and legitimate ecommerce packages also unknowingly ferry illegal drugs across the country. Babu made his twice-weekly trips to the Muvattupuzha post office like any small business owner, his packages blending seamlessly with legitimate commerce. The NCB has attempted to address this through regular meetings withIndia Post and private courier services, emphasising enforcement of KYC of the persons who come to book the parcels and CCTV cameras at the place where the person hand over the parcel. They've also pushed for Aadhaar-based verification after discovering 'multiple cases where fake Aadhaar details are being submitted'.Beyond these conventional measures, the agency has developed sophisticated pattern recognition tactics. Investigators now flag neighbourhoods where 'only a few houses or shops receive foreign shipments while larger neighbourhoods receive no such shipments'— ananomaly that often signals drug trafficking operations. The NCB is essentially laying digital nets at the interface points where virtual crime meets physical financial trail offers another avenue for detection. When crypto dealers convert their digital earnings to traditional bank accounts, these transactions can trigger suspicious transaction alerts.'There's a suspicious transaction alerts that is always there, which is already being given by banks to the income tax department,' noted the senior official, though he acknowledged that 'the number of STRs (suspicious transaction re-ports) is also very high,' making it challenging to separate legitimate cryp-to trading from criminal proceeds. But the fundamental postal problem remains unchanged. When asked directly about existing checks and balances, the senior official was refreshingly candid: 'There's no checks and balances to prevent it.'
Time of India
39 minutes ago
- Time of India
Army doctor flies to Bengaluru to join search for dog she rescued in Arunachal hills
Bengaluru: A family in Govindarajanagar, Vijayanagar, is eagerly waiting for the return of one of its members — Kalu, an 18-month-old Indie dog rescued from the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now He went missing on the night of June 28. Three days later, he was spotted near a bar and restaurant in Basaveshwaranagar, around 3km away. However, by the time the family arrived there, Kalu had vanished. Kalu's owner, Kusuma BH, a govt employee, her daughter Harshita, a doctor with the Indian Army, and son Bharat are making painstaking efforts to trace him. Kusuma has announced a reward of Rs 15,000 for anyone who helps in tracing Kalu. Over 500 handbills, featuring Kalu's picture and Kusuma's contact number, have been pasted on walls and distributed among the residents of Basaveshwaranagar, Mahalakshmipuram, Kurubarahalli, JC Nagar and surrounding areas. "Besides, we've taken to social media, seeking help from netizens. But as of now, we haven't heard anything about him," said Kusuma, who works for the public information office. Interestingly, Kalu was found in the hilly terrain of Arunachal Pradesh. Speaking to TOI, Kusuma said her daughter Harshita found him in Dec 2023. "Harshita was working with the army and camping on a mountain. One day, she found four puppies there. They were weak and suffering from some infections. She brought them to her camp and, with the help of a veterinary doctor, nursed them. Unfortunately, three of the puppies died while Kalu survived," she said. Harshita and Kalu grew fond of each other. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "It was she who named him Kalu during her stay in Arunachal Pradesh," said Kusuma. Later, Harshita was transferred to Guwahati, and then to Belagavi in Karnataka this year. "Kalu lived with her in Guwahati. However, she found it difficult to look after him in Belagavi. In Nov 2024, Kalu came to our house here," Kusuma said. According to Kusuma, Kalu goes out for a short walk every night after dinner. "On the night of June 28, he went out but failed to return. Seeing the handbill, a person called us on July 1, saying he had seen Kalu near a bar and restaurant in Basaveshwaranagar. Filled with hope, we rushed to the place, but he had gone by then," she said. Harshita was in Arunachal Pradesh when Kalu went missing. "We hadn't told her about Kalu's disappearance. After searching for two days, I posted his picture in our family WhatsApp group, and Harshita learned about the situation. She took a flight to Bengaluru. I search for Kalu from 5am to 9am, as I have to go to office. But Harshita searches for him all day and returns home late at night," she said.
