Odisha EOW Arrests Mastermind In Job Frauds Across 17 States, Rs 6 Cr Traced

Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Odisha Police arrested the alleged mastermind in an inter-state job racket form Bihar.

The accused, identified as Dharampal Singh of Gopalganj district in Bihar, was arrested by a team of EOW sleuths and is being brought to Bhubaneswar, an EOW press note said.

Singh one of the main accused and mastermind of this job racket operating in at least 17 states. Apart from Odisha, the racket operated in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Rajsthan, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal, Assam, Himanchal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Pumjab and Haryana.

Singh is the Secretary of “Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan” having its registered office in New Delhi and other offices in Mumbai, Bhopal and Dehradun, it said.

The scamsters had developed a website resembling a government website displaying job advertisements.

“Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan” (GRKS) invited application for various jobs like district and block coordinator, computer operator, block surveyor etc. prescribing educational qualification and 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 web only.

To gain the confidence of the job seekers they also offered reservations and concessional fee as it is done for Govt job. They also give advertisement in local newspapers.

They used to conduct online exam and interview too. In the website they used to give syllabus for each post. In their website they also warned the job seekers about Job Fraud. Being attracted by such advertisement which resembles to that of the government, lakhs of unemployed youths across the nation applied for the posts from 2020 onwards by paying the required application fees.

Though the applicants were being made to sit in online examination, none of them was being given appointments and were deliberately disqualified.

In this way, GRKS was misappropriating the application fees amounting to crores of rupees from the gullible job seekers. The amounts collected from the candidates were landed in different accounts ultimately controlled/managed by the arrested accused who happens to be the Secretary of Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan.

They used to conduct fake scholarship online exam too. The scamsters were using many shell/ sister companies for routing and money laundering the ill-gotten money.

As of now transaction, fraud and money laundering of about Rs 6.6 crores has been traced. Further investigation is on, the EOW added.