Mumbai, May 24 -- Sometime in February, Ramprakash Mandal, a resident of Virar, was caught travelling on a train without a ticket. Already in a lot of debt, he had to pay a fine, which infuriated him. But it also gave him an idea-one that would eventually get him arrested. Mandal, 40, was arrested on Wednesday in Kalyan for allegedly impersonating a ticket checker and collecting fines from passengers on trains. The police found a fake receipt book on him, which he had got made from a local stationery shop by duplicating the receipt of the fine he had paid three months ago. He even had fake Indian Railways identity cards, according to the police. "Once he realised that he could cheat commuters easily, he began penalising passengers for the past three months by impersonating a ticket checker," said an officer from the Government Railway Police (GRP). The officer added that Mandal used a whitener to erase his name from his fine receipt. He then went to a stationery shop in Virar and prepared a fake receipt book based on that single receipt. He also got fake stamps, identity cards and lanyards like the ones used by railway ticket inspectors. "After that, he started cheating passengers by posing as a ticket inspector in long-distance trains going to states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh," said the officer. Mandal's fraudulent scheme was functioning smoothly until the chief ticket inspector at Indian Railways, Haresh Dahilkar, received information that bogus ticket inspectors were operating on long-distance trains. Accordingly, a team led by Dahilkar was deployed to catch the fake ticket checkers. On Wednesday, the team boarded a train travelling from the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus in Kurla to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. When the train left Kalyan railway station, the team spotted a person dressed as a ticket inspector checking passengers' tickets. "We pretended to be passengers and told him that we did not have tickets," said the GRP officer. "Mandal told us to pay the fine and went ahead with making the receipt. Mandal made four receipts worth Rs.2,640, which were found to be fake. All the pages in the receipt book he had had the same number." The police also found fake Indian Railways and Travelling Ticket Examiner identity cards at Mandal's home, along with a fake stamp, officers said. The officers took Mandal to the Kalyan railway police station and booked him for cheating, impersonating a public servant, and forgery, among other charges....