Online glitch at TTD helps miscreants mint money

Online glitch at TTD helps miscreants mint money
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Loopholes in the online ticket booking software for Aarijitham at the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams TTD has helped fraudsters make fast cash by taking advantage of the technical glitch The authorities stumbled on the glitch in the software when they found that two persons were exploiting the loophole to mint money

Tirupati: Loopholes in the online ticket booking software for Aarijitham at the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) has helped fraudsters make fast cash by taking advantage of the technical glitch. The authorities stumbled on the glitch in the software when they found that two persons were exploiting the loophole to mint money.

One such person identified as Prabhakar from Maharashtra, booked Suprabhatham tickets with fake Aadhaar card and sold them to pilgrims at a very high rate. An outsourcing employee of TTD also made illegal use of the technical glitch and booked Aarjitham tickets with fake voter ID cards through via TTD’s official website.

Prabhakar, a native of Sholapur, booked a number of Aarjitham tickets using Aadhaar cards under fictitious names and sold them to pilgrims. He charged pilgrims thousands of rupees for Aarjitham tickets. He used to create fake Aadhaar cards with photo of the pilgrims.

In the same way, a TTD out-sourcing employee, identified as Srinivas, had been booking Aarjitham tickets through bogus voter Id cards. The officials also overlooked to check whether the Aadhaar cards carried by the pilgrims were genuine or not at Vaikutham complex, which helped the illegal operations to flourish for the last few years. In order to provide easy access to Srivari Aarjitha Seva for pilgrims, the TTD introduced online booking for the most sought after sevas in the year 2000.

Under this method, all sevas are released in bulk every first Friday. Taking advantage of the technical glitches, miscreants used to book tickets using false identity proofs. After coming to know of this, the TTD authorities kept a close watch on the registration process after revamping it. The close vigil helped them in zeroing on the two persons.

One of the Vigilance and Security wing officials, speaking to The Hans India, said that as per the Supreme Court directive, the TTD authorities have not made production of Aadhaar card mandatory at the time of temple entry. This apart, TTD had given the option to book tickets online using voter ID cards.

A pilgrim Sravanan from Chittoor expressed dissatisfaction over the way Aarjitham tickets were being dispensed by the TTD through online process. “Several times we could not succeed in getting Aarjitham tickets regardless of how many times we tried. If unscrupulous elements are at work, no wonder we do not get any tickets," he said.

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