Noida: The special task force (STF) arrested two persons on Thursday night for duping 93 students for admission in MBBS programme from Ghaziabad. The duo bought students’ data from some private institutions and called them to offer seats in government medical colleges. They asked for Rs 15-25 lakh from each candidate and after receiving the money, they disappeared.
The scam came to light when the fraudsters called up a senior cop with the offer, leading to their
arrest. Police found the gang members had duped these students of Rs 1.23 crores, but offered no medical seats.
The arrested have been identified as Ashish Kumar (30), a native of Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh and Sudhir Singh (28) belonging to Mahoba in UP. They operated from a rented accommodation in Pacific Business Park in Maharajpur in Ghaziabad.
Rajiv Narayan Mishra, additional SP (Noida STF) said that some parents had complained that a bunch of people were involved in an admission racket in Ghaziabad. A senior cop had also received an unscrupulous random call from one of the accused informing to secure an MBBS seat for his ward. The accused disconnected the call when the cop started enquiring deeply about the admission procedure.
On Thursday night, the STF team conducted a raid and arrested the two persons from a makeshift premise. They informed that they had accessed the students’ data from different academic institutes in NCR. “We used to target students who had scored poorly in the recently conducted NEET examination as they could not secure a seat in a government college. We told them that we could facilitate admission in a government college through ‘government nominee quota,’ which actually did not exist,” Kumar told police.
The gang members convinced the students and parents into believing that they would facilitate the admissions. “They mostly targeted students belonging to South India. They got Rs 10-30 lakh from each candidate and then disappeared,” said the SP.
The STF team found 23 mobile phones, three landline phones, three diaries, a list of 1,280 students who had appeared in NEET exams, three stamps, two government nominee quota forms, one bank draft, five mobile SIM cards, etc from the rented accommodation. The two had also made fake voter identity cards and Aadhar cards and lived on fake identities. They told police that they had three more accomplices – Neeraj Tripathi, Deepak and one who was called as Guptaji. “A case has been registered against them under sections 420, 467, 468, 469, 470 of the IPC in Link Road police station. They were produced in court on Friday that sent them to judicial custody,” added the police official.
