A few weeks ago, police in India discovered that scammers had set up a fake bank branch – complete with logo, office furniture and even some employees – in a village in Chhattisgarh state. BBC Hindi has pieced together what happened.
Jyoti Yadav was elated when she got a job as an office assistant at a newly opened bank branch near her village.
She had been looking for a job for four years and was 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 recognizable brands.
But just a week after she joined, police and employees from a nearby SBI branch arrived at the bank – about 200 km from Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur – and told them it was fake.
Yadav was stunned. She said the people who gave her a job interviewed her, gave her an appointment letter and provided her with an identity card, with a promised salary of 30,000 rupees ($357; £273) a month. She had gone to work with five others.
Police have arrested one person and are looking for eight others.
Job-related scams are not uncommon in India, where millions of young people are desperate for a stable job. In 2022, more than 20 men who thought they would get a job in the Indian Railways were made to count trains for days.
The jobs crisis is especially acute in small towns and villages, where job opportunities are limited, often forcing young people to take risks such as paying bribes – which are illegal in India – for jobs that promise to secure their future.
Police said the six employees of the fake bank came from financially weak backgrounds, and some of them had paid significant amounts of money as bribes for the job.
An officer involved in the investigation told BBC Hindi that the motive appeared to be to defraud job seekers of money.
According to the initial investigation, a large number of people were asked for money on the pretext of securing a job in the bank and sent to the fake branch for “training”, the officer said.
After about two weeks of training, they were sent back with the promise that they would soon be ‘appointed’ at an SBI branch, he added.
Those who were allegedly duped say the fraudsters made the bank appear legitimate.
Yadav says she submitted an online form, uploaded her education certificates and submitted biometrics as part of the onboarding process – which is common at many Indian companies.
“I never had the feeling that I had been caught in fraud. But now everything is ruined,” she said.
She claimed to have paid 250,000 rupees – an amount she found difficult to raise – as a bribe for the job.
Rohini Sahu, from a village in the neighboring district, was offered a job as a marketing officer by the fake employers.
Sahu told BBC Hindi that her offer letter stated that she had been appointed to the Raipur chapter of the SBI, but she had to undergo training in the department.
The letter, the sign, the building and its infrastructure all convinced her that it was a real bank.
“Nobody could have imagined in their wildest dreams that this wasn’t a legitimate bank,” she says
Residents of the village where the branch was located said they were happy when it came to market as it promised easy access to banking services.
But some villagers who wanted to open accounts were told by employees that the bank was still installing servers and that they should come back next month.
For some it also offered business opportunities.
Ajay Agarwal, one of the villagers, immediately applied to operate a kiosk under a scheme that allows people to operate limited banking services outside the bank’s premises.
Such banking kiosks are common in villages and small towns across India.
But he says he soon became skeptical after his application was not approved and approached the SBI branch nearby to ask questions about the branch.
Soon the local police raided the bank. But by then the branch ‘manager’ had already gone into hiding.
The man they arrested, police say, is also a suspect in another job scam in the state. He has not made any statement in police custody.
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