Maligaon, Feb 19: Railway Protection Force (RPF) has been able to successfully crackdown a pan India organised racket which used illegal softwares such as ‘ANMS’, ‘MAC’ and ‘Jaguar’ to bypass the IRCTC’s login captcha, booking captcha and bank OTP to generate tickets illegally.
A genuine user has to go through all these processes for booking his/her tickets through IRCTC sites. While the booking process for normal user usually takes around 2.55 minutes, but those using these illegal softwares could do the same in around 1.48 minutes, thereby depriving genuine customers.
Indian Railways does not allow agents to book tatkal tickets and during last two months RPF arrested 60 persons who used illegal softwares to book tickets from IRCTC site making it difficult for others to get Tatkal bookings of tickets.
The IRCTC’s ticket booking site also reflects the impact of the RPF action as it shows a jump in the availability of Tatkal tickets. The position taken from different zones now show that the Tatkal tickets are available for longer duration for genuine passenger to book. In some of the trains where Tatkal bookings used to last for two minutes, now lasts for more than an hour.
The RPF monitored the entire crackdown from Delhi and arrested persons from places like Jodhpur, Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong, Lucknow, Bengalore, Ahmedabad etc. During special drive against agents launched on 11th and 12th February, 2020, 319 IRCTC agents were arrested, 317 agent IDs identified for blacklisting.
Future railway tickets worth Rs. 37.86 lakhs were blocked and used tickets worth Rs. 1.19 cr recovered. 3 agents also confessed having used illegal software to book railway ticket. After action by RPF, software like ANMS, MAC stopped functioning.
It may be mentioned here that RPF arrested 420 IRCTC agents during special drives conducted during the period from April 2019 to January 2020. Such drive by RPF will continue.
