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Victims say they contacted the culprit through reliable directory services.

Sanket Mishra wanted to spend a few days in the exotic locales of Mauritius with his US-based family. All he needed was a passport agent. The 26-year-old called up Justdial and within minutes he got a call from an agent. The man visited him the very next day and collected several documents and Rs 8000, promising prompt services. Sanket never heard from him again.

The Saket resident could neither go for the family trip nor did he get his passport. "I wanted to see my entire family who are in US, so I had planned this vacation. As I did not know any agent personally, I tried the most trusted method by calling Justdial.

There I asked for the number of a passport agent and soon I disconnected the call and got a call from a person named Neeraj Sharma who said that he was passport agent and promised to get my work done in 15 days.

Next day he came to my house took all the documents, made me sign many several others and also gave me a file name. Since then I have been trying his mobile numbers (9899123774, 9650810191) but they are switched off," the victim said.

Sanket not only kept calling but also went to visit the office address on Neeraj’s visiting card. "I visited his office 310, 1st floor Bhikhaji Cama Place which also turned out to be a fake address. Everything about him was fake," he said.

Sanket is not the only victim of Neeraj. Naval Kishor a businessman and Krishna Rao who works with Ranbaxy, were duped in similar fashion. Naval wanted to get his passport made so he visited Sulekha.com for passport agent after which he collected Rs 7,000 for tatkal passport and later switched off his mobile phone.

MiD DAY made several calls on the number printed on Neeraj’s visiting card but the phone was switched off. After visiting Ansal Chambers at Bhikaji Cama Place, we found no travel company exists on that address.

Promise of action

Although contact service provider Sulekha maintains huge amounts of data which makes it impossible to monitor each and every number, but they claim to take quick action against any complaint. "We have a list of around 10 lakh companies and services with us making it very difficult to track each one of them.

In case of any complaint we have a review mechanism and a customer can call or write to us. As we receive the complaint we contact the company to reply to the complaint. If we get several complaints against one particular company we ban them and remove their contact from our website," said Satya Prabhakar, President and CEO of Sulekha.com.

"Our CSE (Customer Service Executive) speaks with the affected caller and arranges for a con-call with the concerned client to resolve the issue. In case the client is found to be a cheat/phony or is involved in any illegal activity, then we immediately freeze the contract and blacklist the same.

Thereafter, the listing will not appear on our records. We also have a ’Report Abuse’ tab that appears on each result page on our website. A user can thus immediately inform us of any fraudulent cases and we take prompt action on the same. Besides this we have over a million reviews and ratings listed which help users balance the veracity of the Vendor’s claims effectively," said Justdial.