Police have detained a woman sales manager of a private bank and her engineer husband for allegedly creating a fake season pass for local railway travel in the Mumbai suburban network using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, officials said on Thursday.
The couple's fraud came to light on November 26 when a ticket checker was examining the tickets in an AC local train going to Dadar in Mumbai from Kalyan in Thane, in which the woman was travelling, they said.
She was caught when the train was between Kalyan and Dombivli stations, they said.
Ticket checker Vishal Tukaram Navle was inspecting tickets in the AC local train. When he asked the woman, Gudiya Omkar Sharma (28), to show her ticket, she told him that she had a season pass, but failed to open it through the railway's official Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) mobile app. She opened a link on the Google Chrome browser to show the pass. The QR code section was also non-functional, the police said.
The ticket checker grew suspicious, and in order to verify the pass' serial number, he contacted the Central Railway helpline, and the authorities told him that the pass expired in February this year. It also came to light that the pass was registered under a male name - Omkar Sharma - who is her husband, they said.
After the fraud was detected, the woman and her 30-year-old husband were detained. During his questioning, Omkar confessed to using his coding knowledge to indulge in this sophisticated forgery. He said he used AI tools to generate a counterfeit UTS pass, according to the police.
After that, the Kalyan railway police registered a case against them under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) sections 318 (4) (cheating), 336(2) (forgery), 336 (3), 340 (forged document or electronic record and using it as genuine), and 3(5) (common intention).
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Track Latest News Live on NDTV.com and get news updates from India and around the world
