UK Job Offer Scam in Warangal: Aradhana Sharma on How Pranati Lost ₹20,84,216 to a Gift Shop That Never Opened

Pranati’s first message to me came on WhatsApp in September 2026. It was polite and careful, the way people write when they are not sure the other person will take them seriously. She said she was from Warangal, that she had paid a lot of money for a job in the United Kingdom, and that the job did not exist.

I have relatives in both Telugu states, and I can manage Telugu, though mine is the textbook kind. I can read a form and follow a slow conversation, but the quick, everyday Telugu of a worried family on a phone call still makes me ask people to repeat themselves. Pranati was patient with me. We moved from WhatsApp messages to long Microsoft Teams calls, and we kept talking from September until the day before I sat down to write this.

What she shared over those weeks was heartbreaking, and it was also organised. She had the bank transfer slips. She had call recordings. She had the job offer letter. She had the names of the people she paid and the dates she paid them. She had given permission for her story to be told, and she wanted it told for one reason: so the next family in Warangal, Karimnagar, Guntur or anywhere else in the Telugu states does not walk into the same room.

This is her story as she told it to me, checked against the papers she showed me. Where I add something, it is the checking I would do now, after hearing her, before anyone pays an agent a single rupee for a job abroad.

The UK job offer scam in Warangal that started with a known name

Every UK job offer scam in Warangal and across Telangana that I have heard about starts in the same place: with someone you already trust. Nobody hands ₹20 lakh to a stranger. They hand it to a cousin’s friend, a colleague’s brother, a man everyone in the colony says “got three people to London last year.”

For Pranati, that man was Sundar Rao.

Sundar Rao runs an automation agency, a startup based in New Delhi. To the people around him in the Telugu states, he was the person with contacts abroad. Pranati told me that some people she knew had gone to the UK through his introductions and were, at that time, settled and working. Their success was the advertisement. Nobody needed a poster or a Facebook ad when a known family could say, “Our son is there, it worked for us.”

Sundar Rao introduced Pranati to two brothers living in the UK: Madan Kulkarni and Piyush Kulkarni. According to Pranati, both had lived in the UK for more than a decade. They were presented as people who had businesses there and could offer jobs, and through those jobs, a path to permanent residence.

That last part matters. Pranati’s plan, like the plan of many families I speak to, was not a short trip. It was to go, work, settle, and over the years reach PR. The job was the door. PR was the house behind it.

All three of these men, Sundar Rao, Madan Kulkarni and Piyush Kulkarni, are now named as accused in an FIR that Pranati’s family filed in Warangal on 29 August 2026. Everything I describe about their roles in this article is Pranati’s account and the account in that complaint. The case is with the police, and the court will decide what is proven.

Some of the people who first went abroad through these introductions, the same people whose success made Pranati trust the process, later told her they had become victims too.

That detail stayed with me longer than the money. The early “success stories” were not proof the system worked. They were part of how the trust was built, and some of those early families later found themselves in the same trap, some after taking gold loans to pay.

How the money moved: six NEFT transfers over nine months

Pranati paid a total of ₹20,84,216. She did not pay it in one go, and that is exactly the point.

The money moved in six instalments, all through NEFT bank transfers:

I am not breaking down the amount of each instalment here, at the family’s request. The total is the figure on the FIR side of this story, and the dates are from the transfer records Pranati showed me.

Look at the shape of it. The first payment was small. Small enough that any family would think, “Even if this goes wrong, we lose a little.” Then the trust is there, and the second step comes. Then the third. By the time the amounts are large, the family has already paid so much that stopping feels like losing everything. Walking away at instalment three means writing off instalments one and two. So people keep going.

I have seen this same staircase in very different frauds: fake trading apps, fake loan offers, fake visa agents. The first step is always cheap. The staircase is the product.

Why the money never went to the brothers’ own accounts

This is the part of Pranati’s story that I would ask every reader to remember.

Not one rupee went into an account in the name of Madan Kulkarni or Piyush Kulkarni.

The brothers live in the UK and, as Pranati understood it, hold permanent status there. If money from India started arriving in their own bank accounts again and again, someone would eventually ask them what it was for. So, according to Pranati, they never gave their own account numbers. Instead they gave her the account details of other people in India.

The accounts she was told to send money to were held in the names of minors, children of about 14 and 15 years of age.

I will not print those names, and nobody should. They are children. But think about what this does. A family sending money believes they are paying “the company” or “the processing team.” In reality, the money lands in accounts that are hard to connect to the people who asked for it. When the family later goes to the police, the first names on the bank trail are not the names of the people who promised the job.

If an agent abroad asks you to send money to “someone else’s account in India,” that one sentence is enough reason to stop.

There is no honest reason for a real employer or a real visa process to need your money in a third person’s personal account. Visa fees are paid to the government, online, through the official application. A real employer does not collect “processing charges” from the worker through a teenager’s savings account.

The restaurant that opened for a few days and closed

For the first months, the job on offer was in a restaurant in the UK. Pranati was told the restaurant was owned by the brothers’ business, that there would be a role for her, and that the papers would follow.

The papers did not follow. What followed were promises. “Tomorrow you will get the letter.” Then tomorrow came, and it was another tomorrow. Pranati told me these “tomorrow” messages went on for weeks.

Then came the turn in the story. She was told that the restaurant had unfortunately closed for some reasons. But, they said, there was no need to worry. There was another business, a gift shop, and she would be given a manager post in the gift shop instead.

This is where Pranati’s doubt began. A manager post sounds like a promotion. When a fraud is under pressure, it often offers more, not less. The bigger title is there to stop you from asking the obvious question: where did the restaurant go?

She took two to three months to think. Then, in February 2026, she paid the fourth instalment.

Later, when she was in the UK and went to the restaurant’s address herself, she found the answer. There was no restaurant there. From what she learned, there had been a restaurant for only a few days. Long enough for an opening ceremony. Long enough for photographs. Then it closed.

Those opening photos were the proof she had been shown from India. A ribbon, a few smiling faces, a shop front. That is all a photograph can prove: that people stood in a place on a day. It cannot prove that the place has staff, stock, customers, a payroll or a future.

The fake UK sponsorship job offer and the gift shop manager job scam in the UK

After the gift shop story began, the job offer letter finally arrived.

Pranati showed me the letter. It named the role, and it named a salary that, in her words, was decent. I am not going to describe the letter’s details, the company name or the salary figure in this article. The family asked me not to, and their reason is a good one: a clear description of a working fraud letter is a template for the next fraud. People would copy it, edit it and send it to the next family.

What I can tell you is what the letter did. It turned a promise into paper. It gave the family something to hold, to show relatives, and to use when applying. With the letter in hand, Pranati applied for her UK visa. And with the visa process under way, she was told she could fly and bring the remaining money with her.

The last two transfers went in April 2026: one on 7 April, and the last on 28 April.

A gift shop manager job scam in the UK has a pattern, not just a victim

Pranati is not the only person in this story. From what she gathered, and from the other victims who have since reached me through her, the brothers had taken money from somewhere between 9 and 15 people from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

The pattern, as these families describe it, goes like this:

• The brothers open small businesses in the UK, such as gift shops and restaurants.
• The businesses are registered on paper, with the minimum tax paid to keep them alive as names.
• Inside, there are no staff, no equipment, no stock, nothing that a working business needs.
• Families in India pay large amounts in instalments, through accounts that are not the brothers’ own.
• A job offer letter is issued in the name of one of these businesses.
• Once the worker is in the UK, the job is supposed to pay a monthly salary that shows on payslips.
• The payslips do not come. The salary stops, or never starts. The business never actually opens.

That last part, the payslips, is where the whole thing collapses for the worker. On a sponsored job in the UK, a regular salary with proper payslips is not a nice extra. It is the evidence that you are doing the job you were brought in for. Without payslips, you have nothing to show for your time there, and nothing that helps you take the next step toward settling.

A business that exists only on paper can sign a letter. It cannot pay you every month.

In the UK: no gift shop, only a friend’s restaurant and some “PR holders”

Once Pranati reached the UK, she wanted to see her workplace. That is the most natural request in the world.

She was not taken to the gift shop.

Instead, she met the brothers at a friend’s restaurant. The owner of that restaurant was shown to her as someone close to them. Then she was introduced to two or three other people. These people spoke very highly of the brothers. They said, more or less, “We are blessed. We are PR holders now because of these two.”

I want to be fair here. I do not know who those people were, and I cannot say what their own story is. But I can say how the moment worked on Pranati. She had come thousands of kilometres. She was tired, alone, and had paid more than ₹20 lakh. And in front of her stood living proof, people saying it had worked. It is very hard to keep doubting when the room is full of smiling success stories.

After that meeting, Pranati kept asking to see the shop. Where is it? When can I visit? When do I start?

Every time she asked, the conversation moved somewhere else. They kept her talking online. They changed the topic. They gave reasons. They found other things to discuss. This went on for a few months, and Pranati told me that within that time, she understood. There was no gift shop for her. There was no job.

After the last transfer at the end of April 2026, the calls stopped. Nobody picked up the phone.

When the broker’s face changed

When the brothers stopped answering, Pranati turned to the person who had introduced them: Sundar Rao.

Until that point, she had seen him as a middleman, maybe even as someone who had also been misled. That changed when the phones went silent. In the way he behaved once the money was gone and the calls were not being answered, she saw a different person. She told me that this was the moment she understood Sundar Rao was not standing outside this. He was part of it.

This is also why the people who had first gone abroad through him matter. Pranati said Sundar Rao charged very large amounts, and that some families took gold loans to pay. Those families had trusted the same network, and some of them now say they are victims too.

UK visa agents in Warangal and the Telugu states: what the news already shows

Pranati’s case is not a lonely exception. Telugu newspapers keep reporting the same kind of story. When I went looking, I kept to Telugu reporting, because that is where the families in these stories read the news.

Eenadu reported a ₹5.05 crore fraud in Hyderabad by a person who promised jobs in London. The scale is larger than Pranati’s case, but the promise is the same city and the same kind of job.

Eenadu also reported a cheating case against a YouTuber couple accused of using UK jobs as bait and collecting large sums. Again, the face of trust was a familiar one, this time a channel people watched, rather than a relative.

Closer to home for Telangana readers, Eenadu ran a report on how fake agents are spreading across the Telugu states along the path to overseas work, and another on a man arrested in Nizamabad district in a job visa fraud case.

At the national level, Eenadu reported that the Centre sent states a key advisory on frauds and trafficking through overseas job offers. And for Andhra Pradesh readers, Eenadu’s piece on staying safe from fake consultancies is worth reading before talking to any agent.

I am not saying these cases are connected to Pranati’s. They are not part of her FIR. I am saying the method is familiar enough to have its own place in the Telugu news pages now. On the UK side, the government said in early 2026 that it planned to make advertising fake visa sponsorship a criminal offence, which tells you how common these offers have become there too.

UK visa agent NEFT fraud: the red flags I would not ignore

When I go back over Pranati’s months, I can see several moments where the story could have stopped. I am not saying this to blame her. Every one of these moments looks small from the inside. From the outside, written in a list, they look very loud.

The NEFT payments to minors’ bank accounts deserve one more line. If a bank transfer ever asks you to type a name that is not the company, not the employer and not a government department, read that name twice. If you are told the account belongs to “a family member” or “the processing team,” ask why a business needs a child’s account to receive money. There is no answer to that question that should make you comfortable.

A UK PR job promise is not something an agent can sell

Pranati’s family wanted PR in the long run, and there is nothing wrong with that dream. Many Indians who move to the UK for work hope to settle one day.

But PR in the UK is not a product an agent sells you on day one. A work route visa is tied to a real job with a real employer, and settling permanently is a later stage that depends on years of lawful work and the rules in force at that time. Anyone who says “pay us and we will get you PR” is selling the end of a long road as if it were the ticket at the start. That sentence alone tells you they are selling something they cannot give.

What I would check before paying any UK visa agent in Warangal or anywhere else

I am a licensed financial analyst, and I came back to India after years of living and working abroad, so most of my working life is spent on money decisions that cross borders. Here is the list I now give anyone in the Telugu states who tells me they are about to pay for a job abroad. It comes straight out of the gaps in Pranati’s story.

1. Check the employer, not the agent. A UK employer that sponsors foreign workers must hold a sponsor licence, and the UK government publishes a register of licensed sponsors. Search the exact company name on the letter. If it is not there, stop.
2. Check that the business is real and trading. A registered company name is not a working business. Ask for the address and have someone you trust in the UK, someone the agent did not introduce, go and look.
3. Never pay into a personal account. Not a relative’s, not a “manager’s,” and never a minor’s. Visa fees go to the government through the official application. Your employer does not charge you for your own job.
4. Do not pay in a staircase. Ask for the full cost, in writing, with what each payment is for. If the total keeps growing after you start, that is the fraud showing itself.
5. Do not let a bigger title calm you down. When a job changes from one business to another, and the new role sounds better, ask more questions, not fewer.
6. Do not pay the last money before you see the workplace. “Bring the rest when you fly” means they want everything before you can see the truth.
7. Talk to people you find yourself. Success stories arranged by the agent are not evidence. They are part of the sales pitch.
8. Check whether the recruiter is registered in India. Recruiting agents for overseas jobs are expected to be registered with the Ministry of External Affairs, and the government’s eMigrate system lists registered agents. Ask for the registration number and check it yourself.
9. Keep every record from day one. Pranati’s case moved because she kept transfer slips, recordings, the letter and the dates. Without those, an FIR is much harder.
10. If money has gone, report it fast. For online money fraud in India, the national helpline is 1930, and complaints can also be filed on the national cyber crime reporting portal. Then go to your local police station and file a written complaint.

None of these steps are expensive. Most of them cost one phone call or ten minutes of searching. Pranati’s family paid ₹20,84,216 for the lack of them.

Pranati’s FIR in Warangal and her decision to go public

When Pranati came back to Warangal, she did not stay quiet. On 29 August 2026, an FIR was filed in Warangal naming Sundar Rao, Madan Kulkarni and Piyush Kulkarni as accused.

She has also decided to speak publicly. She recorded an interview with the Telugu channel NTV on 6 November 2026, which was due to be broadcast the next day. She is also scheduled to appear on TV9 on the evening of 11 November 2026, with the programme expected to air the following afternoon.

I asked her once why she was willing to put her face and her story out there, when so many families hide this kind of loss out of shame. Her answer was simple: the other families. Several victims have now reached me through her, people from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana with very similar stories. Some lost less, some lost more, some took loans against family gold. Each one thought they were the only one.

The shame belongs to the people who took the money, not to the families who trusted them.

I will be writing about some of those other families in this series, with their permission, and about the related cases that reached me involving Australia, the US and Europe. Each one has a different face. The method underneath is often the same.

What Pranati’s UK job offer scam should change for families in Telangana

If I could put one idea into every home in Warangal that is thinking about a job in the UK, it would be this: the process is never a secret.

A real job abroad has a real employer you can check. A real visa has a fee you pay to a government, not to a person. A real business has staff, stock and customers, not just a ribbon and a photograph. And a real path to settling in another country takes years of genuine work, not six instalments to a teenager’s account.

Pranati did not lose because she was careless. She lost because every step was designed to feel reasonable on its own. A small fee. A known broker. Smiling photographs. A letter. A bigger job title. People who said, “it worked for us.” Each step, alone, could be explained. Together, they were a trap.

If you are about to pay someone for a UK job, stop at the first step that makes you uneasy and check it with someone who has nothing to gain from your payment. If something in this story sounds like your own situation, you can reach me through the contact page here. I would rather you send me a message today than a transfer slip next month.

Questions People Ask About the UK Job Offer Scam in Warangal