Couple uses AI tools to create fake local railway pass; detained after ticket checker detects fraud
Thane, Nov 27 (PTI): 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).
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Congress using hijab issue to pacify minority anger, alleges Karnataka LoP R Ashoka
Bengaluru: Leader of Opposition in the Assembly R. Ashoka has accused the Congress government of using the hijab issue to placate what he described as discontent among minority voters after the Davanagere by-election.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Ashoka alleged that the state government, instead of addressing issues such as price rise, corruption, farmers’ distress and law and order, was attempting to retain its minority vote base by reviving the hijab issue.
Referring to the 2022 dress code introduced by the BJP government, which prohibited hijab in schools and colleges, Ashoka said the Karnataka High Court had upheld the policy and emphasised the importance of discipline in educational institutions.
He questioned the Congress government’s move to revisit the issue and asked whether setting aside the court-backed policy to benefit one community could be described as secularism.
Ashoka further alleged that while the government was willing to permit hijab, it continued to prohibit saffron shawls.
He accused the government of dividing students on religious lines rather than treating schools and colleges as spaces of equality.
Drawing a comparison with Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, Ashoka claimed that excessive appeasement politics had harmed the state and warned that the Congress in Karnataka could face a similar political response.
He said voters in Karnataka would teach the Congress a lesson for what he termed “vote-bank politics” and for compromising constitutional and judicial principles.
