Hyderabad: Police bust gang selling fake certificates, 4 held

HYDERABAD: Four persons, including a software engineer and a managing director of a private education consultancy, were arrested for allegedly creating and supplying fake education certificates of different universities for people looking to go abroad. The whole scam came to light after the fraudsters slipped up and gave a fake document to a genuine candidate.
A student had approached SL Overseas Educational Consultancy of accused Sirisala Lakshmi to help process his documents for a graduation programme in the US. He submitted his Intermediate certificate and paid 1 lakh. But when he got the full set of documents from the consultancy, he found a fake graduation certificate too from Kakatiya University in his name.
The student lodged a complaint and the Rachakonda police busted the racked on Tuesday.
Along with Lakshmi, software professional V Rohit Kumar, student G Sai Pranay and V Srinivas Rao, who is unemployed, were arrested.
Cops seized forty fake memorandum of marks, fake degree certificates, 30 provisional certificates, two laptops, one printer, two rubber stamps, 30 non-judicial stamp papers and four mobile phones from the accused.
“Using his knowledge of editing photos and documents, Rohit, who works in an IT firm, was preparing fake certificates to earn easy money,” Rachakonda commissioner Mahesh Bhagwat said.
Rohit was using scanned formats of certificates of different universities such as JNTU, Kakatiya University, Acharya Nagarjuna University and others to print fake ones.
Lakshmi, who is also a qualified engineer, earlier worked in different education consultancies and had started her own consultancy six months ago in Chaitanyapuri. She used to help students aiming to go to the US, the UK, Canada and Australia.
The other two accused brought in business by looking for people trying to get fake certificates to go abroad, cops said.
Lakshmi who was suffering losses decided to get into issuing fake certificates to those students who aim to go abroad but dont have the needed education certificates.
Then she came in touch with other accused, who conspired to earn money by collecting ₹1 lakh from each candidate.