The Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of the Odisha Crime Branch has arrested a man from Bihar who masterminded an inter-state job fraud racket and duped job aspirants in 17 states including Odisha.
The accused Dharampal Singh, 40, hails from Bihar’s Gopalganj district.
The crime branch in a media release on Saturday said: “The arrested accused Dharmapal Singh is the secretary of Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan having its registered office in New Delhi and other offices in Mumbai, Bhopal and Dehradun. The scamsters had developed the website resembling a government website displaying the government-like job advertisements.”
About its modus operandi, the crime branch said: “Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan (GRKS) invited applications for various jobs like district and block coordinator, computer operator, block surveyor etc. prescribing the educational qualification and the remuneration for the individual posts. The advertisement also contained the name of the website www.grks.org and the job seekers were required to submit their application through the web only.”
It further said: “They used to conduct online exams and interviews too... In the website, they used to give syllabus for each post. On their website, they also warn job seekers about job fraud. Being attracted by such advertisement which resembles that of the government, lakhs of unemployed youths across the nation applied for the posts from 2020 onwards by paying the required application fees.”
DIG (deputy inspector general of police), State Task Force, Crime Branch, J.N. Pankaj told The Telegraph: “Dharmapal Singh is highly educated and has done his MSc. The sudden rise of online examinations during the Covid pandemic turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him. The applicants were being made to sit in the online examination but none of them was being given appointments and all of them were deliberately disqualified. In this way, GRKS was misappropriating the application fees amounting to Rs 6.5 crore from the gullible job seekers.”
He said: “The amount is likely to go up once the investigation completes.”
