Massive crackdown by Indian Railways on fake accounts for ticket booking, in order to ensure better ticket availability to genuine travellers
In a massive crackdown, Indian Railways has deactivated 3.03 crore fake accounts which were being used for ticket booking. In addition to that, an additional 2.70 crore accounts are temporarily suspended or identified for suspension.
As per the information given by the Union Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting and Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, today on 13th December 2025, Indian Railways has massively cracked down on train ticket booking through fake identities, which seriously inconvenience genuine train travellers who are trying to book a ticket.
As per this information by the Union Minister, following the introduction of a stringent system to establish user identity and to detect fake IDs, now there are only about 5,000 new user IDs that are being added per day on the IRCTC website. Before the latest reforms, there were nearly one lakh new user IDs per day that were being added there.
It was also informed that by using the new stringent system, Indian Railways has already deactivated 3.03 crore (30.3 million) fake accounts. Another 2.7 crore (27 million) user IDs have either been temporarily suspended or identified for suspension, based on the suspicious activities they were indulging in.
This comes as a relief to genuine passengers who were never able to book tickets, as you'd already know this if you've tried to book tickets too, that is, many a times, the tickets would get booked en masse very soon after the booking window would get open for a train, especially Tatkal tickets.
Railway ticket hoarding rackets have always severely inconvenienced genuine travellers, such as, touts or travel agents unscrupulously booking advance reservation tickets in bulk to illegally resell them at a higher price later.
While ticket hoarding makes genuine travellers unable to book a ticket, it also causes losses to the railways too, when the touts cancel tickets after a long time whenever they do not find enough buyers for their hoarded tickets, which may result in empty reserved births in trains which would've otherwise been fully booked.
To curb such nefarious activities of booking en masse for illegal ticket hoarding and reselling, Indian Railways has implemented several steps earlier this year, such as the aforementioned stringent systems with anti-bot application in place to detect fake IDs or accounts, making Aadhaar and OTP-based Authentication mandatory for booking Tatkal tickets online and offline, making Aadhaar Authentication mandatory for booking general Reserved Tickets online during first 15 minutes, etc.
Administrative measures by Indian Railways include deactivation of suspicious user IDs, lodging complaints on National Cyber Crime Portal for suspiciously booked PNRs, and re-validation of user IDs, etc. Also, the up-time of IRCTC website was 99.98% during April 2025-October 2025, while it was 99.86% in 2024-25.
As per the data given by the Ministry of Railways, the number of e-ticketing has since increased to more than 87% of total reserved tickets booked on Indian Railways. However, there were also some complaints received regarding failed transactions or delayed refund or booking errors that are being monitored on a regularly for quick resolution.
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