New Delhi, Aug 18 (IANS): Five persons have been arrested on the charge of duping hundreds of unemployed youths on the pretext of providing them jobs in the Airport Authority of India (AAI) at the IGI Airport here, a senior Delhi Police officer said on Tuesday.

The accused were identified as Sumit Upadhay, Sajid Ali, Shahzad, Pawan, and Sanjay. As many as 18 mobile phones, laptops, 10 SIM cards and some stamps were seized from them.

Explaining their modus operandi, police said the gang members posted advertisements on Facebook to ask for applications for jobs in the AAI and even sent out fake appointment letters to the candidates.

They asked for money to be deposited in different bank accounts on various pretexts.

They also ran a call centre from a rented premises at Khora Colony in Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, where they received a huge number of calls from job aspirants. Calls were initially received by telecallers just to give an impression of genuineness to the callers.

The telecallers, after assuring the victims about direct AAI jobs, asked them to deposit Rs 1,050 each as registration charges in bank accounts.

After a day or two, the accused used to send forged appointment letters of AAI through speed post and asked their victims to deposit Rs 25,550 more for the job agreements. Subsequently, they would send forged insurance documents and ask the victims to further deposit one-time premium of Rs 20,500 for an insurance of Rs 40 lakh during the job tenure.

"The accused kept on asking their victims for more and more money until the later got the idea of the whole racket and stopped communicating with them," said IGI Airport DCP Rajeev Ranjan.