The Special Task Force (STF) of the Uttar Pradesh Police on Saturday arrested three people for allegedly offering National Eligibility cum Entrance Test – Undergraduate (NEET-UG) candidates help to crack the examination through unfair means in exchange for money.
According to an official statement issued by the Noida unit of the STF on Sunday, the three accused have been identified as Vikram Kumar Shah, Aniket Kumar, and Dharampal Singh. Shah and Kumar are residents of Lakshmi Nagar in Delhi, whereas Singh stays in the Sagarpur area of the national capital.
The police said the accused were arrested based on a tip-off, and the three of them ran an office in Noida’s Sector-3.
“On Saturday, we received a tipoff from informants that some suspects were calling relatives of NEET aspirants and offering them deals to pass the test. We then raided the office in Sector-3 at night and arrested the three men and also seized 10 mobile phones, an Apple MacBook, credit, PAN, and Aadhaar cards, examination ID cards, a Fortuner car, and data sheets of candidates from their possession,” said the police.
Vikram Kumar Shah, 30, has purportedly told the interrogators that he met Aniket Kumar at the Vinayaka Missions University, Chennai, while he was studying Biotechnology there in 2011.
Shah also allegedly told the police that they started helping candidates obtain admission at the university for a commission. “After completing their post-graduation in Chennai, they came to Delhi, where they met the third accused, Dharampal,” reads the official statement.
The three registered a company called Admission View. They would collect details of MBBS candidates and offer them deals to secure a seat for Rs 5 lakh. They would tell the candidates to only write down answers that they knew during the exam, and leave the rest blank, saying they would get the answer sheets changed. If the candidate managed to pass, they would take all the money, the Uttar Pradesh Police said.
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“In case the candidate could not clear the exam, we would simply ignore their calls or at times change the location and then move to find new targets,” the accused allegedly told the police.
With complaints piling up against the company, the suspects shut it down in 2023 and started a new firm, Shreyanvi Edu OPC Pvt Ltd, in Noida to continue duping NEET aspirants.
A First Information Report in the matter has been registered under sections 318 (cheating), 319 (cheating by personation), 336, 337, 338, and 340 (all related to forgery), and 61(2) (criminal conspiracy) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
More than 22 lakh medical aspirants took the NEET-UG test across the country on Sunday.
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