With the arrest of one person the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Odisha Police claimed to bust an interstate ‘job fraud racket’ spread across as many as 17 states. The arrested accused, who hails from Bihar is said to be the masterminds of the racket.

The EOW has so far traced Rs 6.6 crore defrauded by the accused with his accomplices.

“The accused, Dharampal Singh, a native of Rupanchak village in the Gopalganj district, was arrested from Hatua in Bihar. After the arrest, he was produced before the Court of Chief Judicial Magistrate, Gopalganj on 16 February and is being brought under five-day transit remand for production in the Sub Divisional Judicial Magistrate Court in Bhubaneswar,” the EOW said in a statement on Saturday.

The gang behind the fraud that used to allure youths with the offer of government jobs and duped them of substantial sums, had spread its network in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Punjab and Haryana.

The fraudsters had developed a website bearing striking resemblance to the government website to offer jobs to aspirants (their victims).

It had 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 and the job seekers were required to submit their application through the web only.

To gain the confidence of the job seekers they also offered reservations and concessional fees as is done in the government job advertisements.

The gang also advertised in daily newspapers with publication in different parts of the country and conducted online examinations and interviews.

Enticed by such the advertisement that resembled that of the government, lakhs of unemployed youths across the country had applied for different posts from 2020 onwards by paying a prescribed application fee. The amounts collected from the candidates were routed to different accounts controlled and managed by the accused.

It may be recalled here that EOW had unearthed a major interstate job fraud racket in December 2022 operating from Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh with the arrest of the mastermind of the well-knit gang. At least 50,000 job seeking youth across the country were duped by the well-knit racket. The duped amount ran to several crores of rupees. That was said to be the biggest job fraud racket busted in the country.