Delhi: Man arrested for duping candidates on pretext of providing degrees

NEW DELHI: A 34-year-old man was arrested for allegedly duping aspirants on the false promise of giving them degrees from reputed universities, police said on Thursday. They identified the accused as Jitender Kumar Sahoo, a resident of Shakarpur here. Deepak Kumar, the complaint, alleged that he stumbled upon an advertisement from Sahoo on social media and contacted him for an enrolment in Bachelors in Homeopathic Medicine and Surgery (BHMS). Kumar alleged that Sahoo charged him Rs 2.50 lakh but failed to enrol him for the course even after six months. He remained unavailable on his phone number and his office was locked, they said referring to the complaint.

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Deputy Commissioner of Police (Rohini), Pranav Tayal, said the police arrested Sahoo near Pillar Number 47, Shakarpur. During interrogation, he revealed to the police that he used to teach Maths and Reasoning at a UPSC coaching centre, but lost his job during the pandemic. Thereafter, he launched an agency to enrol students in schools and colleges. He advertised his agency on newspapers and social media platforms. Later, he came in contact with few people who provided fake marks sheets, police said. “The investigation so far has revealed that the gang has issued around 1,000 fake degrees of several government and private universities, and school boards,” a police officer said.

Sahoo and gang targetted vulnerable students who desired to study overseas and those who had previously taken a break from academics and wanted to continue studies. The suspects used names of renowned universities and boards to lure the aspirants, the officer added. The accused hacked websites of universities and boards to obtain their data charts. They used to edit these charts to add names of their clients for the sake of "authenticity", the police said. “They designed several degree certificates and provided them to clients. They also generated links to download these (fake) degrees by creating false domain names of university websites,” the officer said. Five mobile phones and 64 fake mark-sheets were recovered from Sahoo, police said.