Police in Uttar Pradesh’s Etah district have busted an unrecognised medical college operating out of a 14-room building surrounded by agricultural fields, arresting five people, including the institution’s manager. The facility, styled as BS Medical College and University in the Marhara block, had been functioning without approval from any regulatory body since 2022. Investigators estimate that the syndicate extracted more than Rs 2 crore from unsuspecting students over a four-year period by offering fake admissions, examinations, marksheets, and degrees across several healthcare disciplines.
Staged Abduction Triggers Police Crackdown
The multi-year fraud began to collapse when the college manager attempted to fabricate his own kidnapping to intimidate students who were demanding fee refunds. On September 16, a resident of Mahmoodpur Nagariya informed the emergency response control room that three unidentified men had abducted his brother from the campus and demanded a ransom of Rs 2 lakh. Police formed four dedicated teams and tracked the manager’s digital trail to Agra, where he was located alongside students who had travelled with him on the pretext of receiving their money back.
Investigators discovered that the manager had coerced the students into placing the ransom call to his family using their own mobile phones. The staged abduction was designed to implicate the protesting students in a serious criminal case, thereby silencing their demands for reimbursement. Instead, the intervention by Agra and Etah police exposed the entire academic setup, leading directly to the manager’s arrest and the registration of a criminal complaint lodged by an affected student from Artauni in Agra.
Fabricated Affiliations and Internal Exam Racket
Inquiries into the academic background of the college revealed that the syndicate targeted youth across Etah, Kasganj, Firozabad, Hathras, and Aligarh. Candidates were charged varied rates, ranging from Rs 30,000 per semester for nursing diplomas to Rs 2 lakh for pharmacy programmes. To convince families, the accused cited fake affiliations with Allahabad University, Padmavad College in Hathras, and Monard University, even creating an invented institutional code. Doubts arose after an enrolled female student cross-referenced the college with Allahabad University through an acquaintance, discovering that no such affiliation existed on official portals or records.
The entire academic process was conducted internally without statutory oversight. The operators prepared fabricated question papers, conducted unsupervised tests on the premises, and printed fraudulent marksheets and degrees. During the raid on the Mahmoodpur Nagariya premises, police seized 16 fake identity cards, exam answer books, forged seals, blank admission registers, promotional literature, a laptop, and multiple bank cheques. Fifty-four students were found registered for the current academic session at the time of the crackdown.
Daily Wage Earner Listed as Faculty Member
A closer look at the administrative structure of the fraudulent enterprise uncovered a series of calculated deceptions. The name of the college was derived from Bhagwan Das, a local tea vendor, while Gaurav Agrawal, the son of a retired chief medical officer, was brought into the management structure to project an image of professional credibility.
Among those taken into custody was a 75-year-old man recorded in official files as a professor. During interrogation, he informed officers that he possessed no academic qualifications, worked merely as a peon on the campus, and received a daily wage of Rs 300. Police have initiated proceedings against all five arrested individuals under the Gangsters Act and have commenced the identification of assets accumulated through the racket for official attachment.
Follow for daily updates on cybercrime, corporate fraud, DFIR, hacking, investigations, and digital forensics
