LUCKNOW In a swift operation, Lucknow police arrested a gang of four men from Chhattisgarh on Wednesday for allegedly manufacturing and selling counterfeit IPL tickets outside the Ekana Stadium. The tech-savvy syndicate utilised professional design software and artificial intelligence to meticulously forge the match passes.
“The arrested men were identified as Shrikant Borkar, 30, a graduate who runs a car-wash business and also does designing work; Nutan Kumar Sahu, 28, an architect/designer with a civil polytechnic qualification; Rajendra Chaudhary, 29, who is also involved in the car-wash business and Vishwajeet Sahu, 22, a 2D/3D designer who allegedly handled the fake ticket editing work,” said additional DCP (south) Vasanth Rallapalli.
Police said all the accused were residents of Durg district in Chhattisgarh. And the educational and technical backgrounds of the accused helped them replicate IPL tickets with surprising accuracy.
According to police details, the gang sourced images of original IPL tickets from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and recreated them using CorelDraw and other editing tools. Vishwajeet allegedly designed the tickets, while the others arranged printing and sales outside stadiums.
“The accused also used ChatGPT to understand ticket dimensions, paper specifications and print quality so the forged tickets could resemble genuine ones. The tickets were printed on 170-GSM sheets to mimic the texture and finish of original passes,” the ADCP added.
According to police, the gang would travel to cities hosting IPL matches and target fans searching for cheaper tickets outside stadiums. “Payments were collected through UPI transfers, mainly into the bank account of accused Shrikant Borkar,” police stated in an official release.
“The case surfaced after Pradeep Singh, a resident of Jalaun district, complained to Sushant Golf City police that he had purchased two IPL tickets for ₹1,000 outside the stadium, only to discover at the entry gate that the tickets were fake,” said RR Upadhyay, SHO (Sushant Golf City), whose joint team of cyber cell and police launched an operation and arrested the four accused near Dodankheda crossing within 30 minutes, officials said.
“During questioning, the accused allegedly revealed that they had earlier attempted to sell fake tickets outside Delhi’s Arun Jaitley Stadium, but failed because the barcode quality did not match original tickets. They later refined the designs before arriving in Lucknow on May 6,” said the ADCP.
Police recovered the fake IPL tickets, blank printing sheets, paper cutters, four mobile phones, a laptop, ATM cards, bank documents and a car allegedly used by the gang.
