Mumbai Couple Arrested For Creating Fake Railway Pass Using AI Technology

A bank sales manager and her engineer husband were apprehended by police for allegedly creating a counterfeit season pass for Mumbai's suburban railway network using Artificial Intelligence technology.

The fraudulent activity was discovered on November 26 when a ticket inspector was checking passengers' tickets on an AC local train traveling from Kalyan in Thane to Dadar in Mumbai, where the woman was a passenger.

Authorities caught the woman between Kalyan and Dombivli stations during a routine ticket inspection.

Ticket checker Vishal Tukaram Navle requested the woman, identified as Gudiya Omkar Sharma (28), to present her ticket. She claimed to have a season pass but was unable to access it through the railway's official Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) mobile application. Instead, she opened a link in Google Chrome to display the pass. The QR code section of the pass was non-functional, raising suspicion.

The inspector, becoming skeptical, contacted the Central Railway helpline to verify the pass's serial number. Officials informed him that the pass had expired in February this year. Further investigation revealed that the pass was registered under her husband's name, Omkar Sharma.

After detecting the fraud, both the woman and her 30-year-old husband were detained by authorities. During interrogation, Omkar admitted to utilizing his coding knowledge for this sophisticated forgery. He confessed to employing AI tools to generate a fake UTS pass.

Following the incident, the Kalyan railway police filed charges against the couple under several sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including section 318(4) for cheating, 336(2) and 336(3) for forgery, 340 for using a forged document or electronic record as genuine, and 3(5) for common intention.