HYDERABAD: Three persons, including the vice principal and associate professor of a private college, have been arrested by the Hyderabad police for their involvement in cloning fingerprints of faculty members of various educational institutions. Another accused, the secretary of Vivekananda Group of Institutions, is absconding. An associate professor at Nova Engineering college B Ramakrishna, P Sriram Prasad, vice-principal of Vivekananda group of Institutions P Sudarshan Reddy and Vivekananda Group of Institutions secretary Gopal Reddy were using fake online biometric attendance and cheating JNTU to make easy money, Hyderabad Police Commissioner Anjani Kumar said.
As per JNTU norms, every engineering college should have one lecturer for every 15 students and so every college in the university has been instructed to install biometric machines in their campuses to record attendance. The machines are linked to JNTU’s server. Ramakrishna designed a technique to clone fingerprints through the Internet.
“Sriram, who was also working at Nova Engineering College, was hard pressed for money after he quit his job in 2017. He contacted Ramakrishna and requested him to prepare cloned fingerprints of faculty members of a few colleges and said he would get in touch with different college managements for orders,” said the commissioner.
Sriram collected original fingerprint impressions of faculty members using hot glue and gave them to Ramakrishna who then cloned the fingerprints using ethylene vinyl acetate. The duo made Rs 4,000 for each cloned fingerprint. Acting on a tip-off, Task Force sleuths, caught the accused red-handed while they were handing over cloned fingerprints to a staffer of a city-based college.