GHAZIABAD: Whether or not there is a diplomatic dispute, Punjabi communities have long been drawn to Canada. Inquire about Popinder Singh, the accused, or Palwinder Singh, the victim. When they ran into one other at an event in January of this year, they both believed they had struck gold.
After defrauding 178 young people of Rs 2.3 crore with promises of opportunities in Canada, Popinder and his manager Preeti left a whole hamlet in Punjab’s Gurdaspur calculating its losses seven months later.
Popinder, a Pathankot native, contacted Palwinder in January and identified himself as a senior human resources executive of a business with headquarters in Ottawa, the nation’s capital. A businessman from Ghaziabad named Palwinder obtained a job thanks to the NRI.
Palwinder was tasked with recruiting 500 young people for positions in various Canadian industries in exchange for a commission, not just one or two. He then went headhunting in his Gurdaspur village of Chawa.
Palwinder found it easy to locate young people there who wanted to establish a career abroad. The minimal monthly wage of 3,380 Canadian dollars, or around Rs 2 lakh, was far higher than what some of them made in a single year.
He claimed to be in charge of hiring for a Canadian business named Zenith Manpower Services. I returned to my hamlet and inquired around because over the next months, he would need to recruit 500 young people. The proposition held enough allure. My list of 178 young people who agreed to pay for the visa and other paperwork quickly grew to 178, Palwinder, a Wave City resident in Ghaziabad, claimed in his complaint.
The cost for the 178 teenagers’ participation in the procedure varied from Rs 80,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh apiece. Airline tickets and offer letters were soon delivered to the houses of 61 of the locals. “When they checked the status of their tickets online three days later, they discovered that they had been canceled. When they went to the Delhi office, they received a guarantee that the tickets would be booked once more. A few days later, the second batch of tickets showed up, but they were also discovered to be canceled. Additionally, this occurred three times, he added.
The young people detected a foul odor. “We made the decision to go to Delhi’s Canadian embassy. There, we discovered that all of the documents given to us were fakes.
By this time, Palwinder, Preeti, and the other employees in the Delhi office who had given the job applicants their phone numbers had turned off their phones. The CP office was also locked.
The IPC’s sections 406 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery), 120B (criminal conspiracy), 468 (forgery), and 471 (using as genuine a forged document) have all been used to file a FIR against Popinder and Preeti, according to DCP (rural) Vivek Yadav.
