Kathmandu, March 17

Police, in association with the Department of Foreign Employment, raided the Balaju-based ‘Easy Foreign Employment Consultancy Centre Pvt Ltd’ and arrested four persons, including its boss, yesterday for allegedly cheating youths with the promise of sending them to Gulf countries for employment.

The suspects are Top Bahadur Mahat, 35, and Jeet Santyal, 19, of Baglung; Raj Kumar Shrestha, 29, of Sunsari and Ramesh Kafle, 26, of Morang. Mahat is proprietor of the consultancy being operated illegally without registering with the concerned agencies.

Police have also seized 132 Nepali passports, a laptop, a hard disk, various documents related to foreign employment, bank cheques and duplicate copies of dozens of visa issued in the name of various persons.

Superintendent of Police Narendra Prasad Upreti at Metropolitan Police Crime Division said Mahat and others collected passports and cash from foreign employment aspirants, only to leave them in the lurch. As Mahat failed to proceed with official requirements for foreign employment, the victims filed a complaint against him at MPCD.

SP Upreti informed that the suspects had charged the victims anything from Rs 100,000 to Rs 200,000 each for ‘documentation and visa’ on the pretext of sending them to Kuwait, Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The suspects took youths into confidence, saying Gulf-based companies had offered Nepali workers lucrative jobs with free accommodation and other benefits. He would also have the victims undergo medical check-up to dispel any suspicion over cheating.

According to MPCD, they had been operating the fraud racket individually and were  not associated with any authorised outsourcing company abroad. Mahat used to hold the passports and remain out of contact with the victims after collecting money from them. In case the victims traced Mahat’s whereabouts and asked him to return their passport with the money, he would threaten them of terrible consequences.

Police also suspect that the gang had been collecting passports from people and paying them equivalent to the fees charged by the Department of Passports for obtaining a new one on the pretext of losing the passports before selling them to forgery racketeers for hefty cash.