BHUBANESWAR: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Crime Branch has arrested an IT engineer from Madhya Pradesh for allegedly cheating at least 50,000 job aspirants across the country to the tune of around Rs 15 crore.
Arpit Panchal of Jaora in Ratlam district was nabbed on January 10 and produced before a court in Bhubaneswar on Sunday. Panchal has a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology degree and was employed in a private firm.
He was a member of the gang involved in one of the biggest job frauds in the country. The EOW had arrested another accused Zafar Ahmed, an engineer by profession, from Uttar Pradesh in December last year.
The scam was executed by a group of engineers from Uttar Pradesh with the help of some website developer experts. EOW officers said Panchal has expertise in creating and designing websites and is well conversant with at least four computer languages. Panchal, Ahmed and other accused had designed nine websites that resembled government portals.
They created websites like Jeevan Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (www.jssy.in), Bharatiya Jana Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (www.bjsry.in), Gramin Samaj Manav Swasthya Seva (www.gsmsss.in), Rajya Janakalyan Gramin Swasthya Sansthan (www.rmssy.in), Kshetriya Gramin Janakalyan Swasthya Sansthan (www.cgjss.in), among others.
Out of the nine websites, they were using four websites to target the job aspirants in Odisha. The EOW’s initial investigation suggests that the accused have duped at least 12,000 job aspirants in the state.
The EOW has identified about 10,000 other victims from Gujarat including thousands of youths in other states such as West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
They were collecting between Rs 3,000 and Rs 50,000 from candidates on the promise of providing them jobs. “Investigation is continuing to establish the involvement of others and ascertain the amount illegally gained by the accused,” said an EOW officer.