Another cheating racket unearthed
THE RACKET BUSTED AT SARASWATI INFOTECH IN MALAVIYA NAGAR WORKED IN A SIMILAR WAY EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT EXPERTS IN CASE WERE SITTING
IN A NEIGHBOURING BUILDING
JAIPUR: The unearthing of another high-tech cheating racket in a centre for constable recruitment scam, the second such incident in a week, has put the state police department on its toes.
The senior police officials on Wednesday called a meeting to apprise their officers of the two incidents and make them aware about the threats and challenges in conducting the exam.
The Special Operations Group (SOG) late on Tuesday night raided the Dolphin Kids International School in Jaipur’s Murlipura, one of the centres for the exam, and found an elaborate cheating setup that was similar to the one busted by the SOG at Saraswati Infotech, Malaviya Nagar Industrial Area, on Sunday night.
A few computers, being used by the candidates at the centre in Murlipura, were connected to computers in another room, said Sanjay Shrotriya, deputy inspector general, SOG.
“The computers in the other room were in turn connected through Internet with computers at a place in Haryana’s Bhiwani. The experts sitting hundreds of kilometers away were accessing the question papers assigned to the candidates and solving their papers,” he added.
The SOG arrested school owner Ram Niwas along with three other school staff – Rajendra, a technician, Mukesh Kumar, the invigilator, and Ram Ratan Sharma, a teacher in the school. They have been booked for cheating, forgery, criminal conspiracy and under sections of the IT Act.
A police team raided the place in Haryana but those operating the racket there had fled by then, said Shrotriya.
The racket busted at Saraswati Infotech worked in a similar fashion except for the fact that experts in that case were sitting in a neighbouring building and the candidate’s computers were connected directly to theirs.
The SOG had arrested the owner of Saraswati Infotech, who the sleuths claimed was the main conspirator in the racket. Apart from the owner Vikas Malik, the SOG had arrested seven other persons including two candidates.
As per the preliminary investigation, the centre owners were charging anything between Rs 2 to Rs 5 lakh from the candidates for illegally helping them crack the exam.
“We got a lead for the second incident when officials of Aptech, while going through old CCTV footage of the school, noticed a suspicious person in the school premises. On probe, we found the person was Abhimanyu, the technician who is in now in our custody for his role in the cheating racket,” said the DIG.
He added that although it the same technician was involved in both the cases, the two were not part of the same racket.
More than 16 lakh applicants are taking the constable recruitment exam of Rajasthan Police. The exam is being conducted over a period of about two months.
The conduct of exams has been outsourced to Aptech Limited, an education and training company, and the exam is being conducted in five phases at 34 centres across nine districts of the state.