Fake education board in Delhi resurfaces after gang members get bail

After the gang was busted in December last year, the police said it had cheating more than 20,000 students across India and jeopardised the careers of many unsuspecting candidates who bagged government jobs using fake certificates issued by them.

Members of a gang arrested last year for running a fake education board that issued illegal marksheets of Class 10 and 12, have restarted the same racket on a much larger scale after coming out on bail, police said on Wednesday.

The gang ran a fake education board in the name of ‘Board of Higher Secondary Education, Delhi’ and operated from west Delhi’s Vikaspuri (HT Photo)

After the gang was busted in December last year, the police said it had cheating more than 20,000 students across India and jeopardised the careers of many unsuspecting candidates who bagged government jobs using fake certificates issued by them.

On Wednesday, Rajesh Deo, deputy commissioner of police (crime branch), said at least one such candidate — who had bagged a UP Police job using a fake degree — had been dismissed from his job after his documents were found to be fake.

The gang ran a fake education board in the name of ‘Board of Higher Secondary Education, Delhi’ and operated from west Delhi’s Vikaspuri, said the DCP..

Police said the gang was busted for a second time on December 12 after the crime branch received a tip-off about the ‘Board of Higher Secondary Education, Delhi’ , said Rajeev Ranjan, additional commissioner of police (crime branch). “We were already working on a similar recent complaint from the Directorate of Education,” Ranjan said.

The first person to be arrested was 23-year-old Altaf Raza, who was one of the six persons nabbed last year as well. The police said he was “one of the masterminds” of the racket. “We arrested him on a day he was to appear at a court hearing in the previous case,” said DCP Deo.

Raza had allegedly learnt the trade from one Shiv Prasad Pandey a few years ago. Pandey was arrested with Raza last year. After coming out on bail, he has gone underground, said the DCP.

The other two men arrested in the latest case are Shambhu Nath Mishra and Manoj Kumar, who run a school in Uttar Pradesh’s Deoria and were allegedly involved in scouting for potential candidates as well as schools in desperate need for recognition certificates.

“The gang promised to provide marksheets and degrees of Class 10 and 12 in two-three months without any tests or requirements. The documents provided were fake,” said DCP Deo.

Each time their website was busted, the gang would allegedly come up with a new portal with a different name.

The police claimed to have recovered a large number of fake marksheets, provisional certificates and migration certificates. “In their last few months of operation, the gang had cheated more than 10,000 students from Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar,” said the DCP.

The gang allegedly charged anywhere between ₹2,000 and ₹5,000 for fake certificates and marksheets. That, investigators said, allowed them to operate easily as their victims rarely approached the police because of the relatively small sum of money involved.