Fraud AdvisoryFraud Advisory: Do Not Trust Fake Merchant Navy Agents
Merchant Navy admission must be handled through a documented and verified process. Candidates and parents should be careful of anyone offering shortcut admission, cash-based seats or guaranteed ship joining.
Do not trust anyone who says
Pay cash now.
No need for eligibility.
Medical fitness can be managed.
Seat is fixed without documents.
Guaranteed job after training.
Pay to my personal account.
Do not tell your parents.
Admission will close today only.
These are warning signs.
HBIMS-NAF&SA follows a zero-middleman approach. Candidates should use only official communication channels, bank-channel payments, written acknowledgement and verified Student Desk support.
How the scam actually works
Nobody gets cheated because they are stupid. They get cheated because the offer arrives at the exact moment they are most hopeful — a 12th result just out, a family waiting, and a stranger who sounds like he has answers. The pattern is almost always the same, and once you have seen it laid out, it stops working on you.
It opens warm. A phone number forwarded by a cousin, a Telegram group, an Instagram page full of ship photos and salary figures. The person is friendly, calls you by name, and knows enough words — DGMA, MTI, CDC, INDoS — to sound official. Nothing is asked for yet. That is deliberate. The first stage is only about earning your trust.
Then the offer narrows. Suddenly there is one institute, one seat, one window. You are told the batch is filling, that a friend just paid, that the price rises Monday. Urgency is the tool, because a person in a hurry does not verify. A real admission process never expires in an afternoon.
Finally the money moves sideways. Not to a company account with an invoice, but to a personal UPI ID, a relative's account, or cash handed over in a hotel lobby. The moment payment leaves a traceable channel, so does your ability to recover it.
Six sentences that should end the conversation
Keep these in your phone. If you hear any of them, you are not talking to an admission process — you are talking to a sales pitch.
"Medical clear ho jayega, tension mat lo." No one can promise this. Medical fitness is decided by an approved examiner against fixed standards, and no agent influences that outcome.
"Job guaranteed hai after training." Training and employment are separate. Any organisation promising a shipboard job before you have even started training is describing something it does not control.
"Sir ke personal account mein daal do." A legitimate fee has an invoice, a company bank account and a receipt. A personal account is the single clearest signal you are being defrauded.
"Papa ko baad mein bata dena." Isolation from your family is a technique, not a courtesy. Any process that asks you to hide a payment from the people funding it is protecting itself, not you.
"Documents baad mein kar lenge, pehle booking." Paying before your eligibility is established means paying for something that may never have been available to you.
"Aaj hi last date hai." Genuine intakes publish dates. Manufactured deadlines exist to stop you checking.
What to do in the next ten minutes
If you have already paid, act now rather than waiting to feel certain. Stop all further payment immediately, including any instalment described as a formality. Screenshot every message, receipt and call log before the other side deletes their account — evidence disappears fast once they realise you have noticed.
Raise it with your bank the same day and ask for a transaction dispute, keeping the reference number they give you. Recovery odds fall sharply after twenty-four hours, which is precisely why we insist on bank-channel payment in the first place.
Then talk to a person who has no financial interest in your decision. Our Student Desk will walk through your documents with you and tell you plainly whether what you were offered was real, even if you never apply through us. That costs nothing, and there is no version of this where staying silent helps you.
Why we are strict about paperwork
Every safeguard on this site exists because the opposite already happened to somebody. Written acknowledgement at each stage, bank-channel payment only, parents included by default, and a documented framework instead of a promise — none of that is decoration. It is the difference between a family that can prove what it was told and a family that cannot.
Seen someone using our name? Tell us.
People impersonate HBIMS-NAF&SA because the name carries weight. Fake pages, forwarded PDFs on our letterhead, WhatsApp accounts using our seal as a display picture, and individuals claiming to be our counsellors have all been reported to us. Every one of those costs a family money and costs us the thing we spend the most effort protecting.
If you have been approached by anyone claiming to represent us, or by anyone offering a Merchant Navy admission in a way that breaks DGMA norms, write to our Student Desk. Send whatever you have — the phone number, the screenshot, the account details, the name of the institute quoted, the document they showed you. Partial information is still useful; you do not need to have all of it.
Here is what happens next, stated plainly so you know what to expect. We verify the facts first, because an accusation is not evidence and we will not act on one. Where the report checks out, we take it up through the channels actually open to us: reporting the account or page to the platform, issuing a public advisory naming the pattern, notifying the institute being falsely named, and escalating to the appropriate authority where the conduct warrants it.
What we will not do is promise you a recovery. Money that has already left your account is recovered through your bank, not through us. What we can do is confirm whether the person who approached you was genuine, stop them reaching the next family, and give you a written record of your report.
Write to studentdesk@nationaladmission.com, or message the Student Desk on WhatsApp at +91 96508 19757. For anything you want held as a formal written record, use admin@nationaladmission.com. Reporting costs you nothing, and it works even if you never intend to apply through us.
