ONGOLE: Prakasam police busted an interstate fake professional course certificate racket and took seven persons into custody in connection with it, on Saturday. The police also seized a printer, hard disk, counterfeit certificates and mark lists, stamps, holograms, registers and a bank account with deposits worth Rs 5,47,537.
The accused were identified as Jampani Venkateshwarlu (49), Silarapu Bala Srinivasa Rao (53), S Sujatha (47), Siddi Srinivas Reddy (25), Koduri Pradeep Kumar alias Pradeep (32), Anaparthi Christopher (47) and Battapothula Venkateshwarlu (48).
Prakasam superintendent of police (SP) Siddhartha Kaushal said Srinivasa Rao came up with the idea to earn easy money and, so, opened a non-profit organisation, named Jawaharlal Nehru Technical Centre (JNTC), in Vizag in 2017. Soon Venkateswarlu and Srinivasa Rao launched a website that claimed that JNTC was approved by the Union Labour Department to run professional courses.
They started offering 584 courses in 15 subjects for which they issued fake certificates. The counterfeit certificates were issued to gullible job seekers for Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 per certificate. Due to the growing popularity, the accused set up 115 branches in 11 districts of the state. Srinivasa Rao and his wife, Sujatha, the key accused in the racket, even gave franchisees on deposits of Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh.
Several centres were also opened in nine states. Gullible youth from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu were lured by JNTC, which issued a total of 2,237 fake certificates, the SP said. “We started an investigation into the racket based on a complaint by one Ch Poornachandra Rao. We will probe further since the racket is spread into many states. We have informed the concerned police departments to publicise the fact that JNTC certificates are fake. We are looking into those who used these certificates to gain government/private jobs.”