Touts were booking as many as 128 tickets per minute from a single computer.
The Central Bureau of Investigation's registration of a case against an assistant manager of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) for allegedly interfering with the IRCTC ticket booking system has vindicated the views of Mumbai-based railway officials that some insiders in IRCTC were hand-in-glove with ticket touts.
dna on October 11, 2014 had published an article about how officials investigating a speed software scam were stunned to see the extent to which touts knew intricate details of IRCTC's online ticket booking system. These officials had told dna at the time that this kind of knowledge of IRCTC's system was only possible with the help of insiders.
On Thursday the CBI registered a case against a Delhi-based IRCTC official and some others under section 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and 420 (fraud) of the Indian Penal Code and section 13 (2) and section 13(1) - pertaining to criminal misconduct by a public servant- of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
Read the previous article here- Ticket touting scam: Key IRCTC officer under scanner
The CBI's case is that this IRCTC official had installed a software programme (called New Trained Software) in the computers of several travek agents that allowed the latter to book 6 separate tickets per minute, that is 36 passengers per minute. This is six times the speed of what a normal commuter gets. With searches at 11 locations in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chenni and Hyderabad, CBI officials believe more skeletons will tumble out as they go through the documents and computer devices recovered in the raid.
The menace of speed software by touts to speed up ticket booking on IRCTC was first unearthed in a major way in September-October last year by the commercial and Railway Protection Force departments of Central Railway after they arrested an Ahmedabad-based man who had supplied this software to several travel agents. The railways had retrieved 4782 tickets worth over Rs 2 crores as part of that touting scam.
The investigations at that time had revealed that touts were being able to circumvent the captcha (acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) in the IRCTC system. Touts were booking as many as 128 tickets per minute from a single computer.
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