Chhattisgarh: How scammers duped India job seekers with a fake bank branch

A few weeks ago, police in India discovered that scammers had set up a fake bank branch – complete with a logo, office furniture and even some employees – in a village in Chhattisgarh state. BBC Hindi pieced together what happened.

Jyoti Yadav was delighted when she got a job as an office assistant at a recently opened bank branch near her village.

She had been job-hunting for four years, facing increasing financial pressure.

The bank officials asked her to join immediately, and she agreed because it was the State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest government-backed lender and one of its most recognisable brands.

But just a week after she joined, the police and employees from a nearby branch of SBI arrived at the bank – about 200 km (124 miles) from Chhattisgarh’s capital, Raipur – and told them it was fake.

Yadav was stunned. She said the people who gave her a job had conducted an interview, issued her an appointment letter and provided an identity card, with a promised salary of 30,000 rupees ($357; £273) a month. She had begun work along with five others.

Police have arrested one person and say they are on the lookout for eight others.

Employment-related scams are not uncommon in India, where millions of young people are desperate to find a stable job. In 2022, more than two dozen men who thought they would get jobs with the Indian Railways were tricked into counting trains for days.

The job crisis is particularly acute in small towns and villages, where work opportunities are limited, often forcing young people to take risks such as paying bribes – which is illegal in India – for jobs that promise to secure their future.

The police said that the six employees of the fake bank came from financially weak backgrounds, and that some of them had paid substantial amounts as bribes for the job.