BHUBANESWAR: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Crime Branch has arrested a person from Bihar for allegedly cheating job aspirants in Odisha and 15 other states to the tune of Rs 6.6 crores. Dharampal Singh of Gopalganj district was arrested in connection with a case registered by EOW on January 25 this year. Singh was one of the main accused in the job scam spread across 16 states.
The accused and his associates have duped job aspirants in Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Singh is the secretary of dubious firm Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan having its registered office in New Delhi and branches in Mumbai, Bhopal and Dehradun. “The scamsters had developed a website which resembled government portals. They uploaded advertisements on their website which looked similar to those of the government,” said EOW IG Jai Narayan Pankaj.
The accused invited applications for various jobs like district and block coordinators, computer operators, block surveyors and others by mentioning the required educational qualification and the remuneration for the individual posts. They published job advertisements in vernacular dailies of Odisha and other states.
The applicants were required to pay fees for appearing in the exams and the payment was made online. EOW officers said the advertisements contained the name of the website www.grks.org and the job aspirants were asked to submit their applications through the portal only. In order to gain the confidence of the job seekers, the accused even offered reservations and concessional fees as it is done for government jobs. They provided the syllabus for each post on the website. Examinations and interviews were conducted online too.