Overview
- The ED’s Patna zonal office searched 16 locations on January 8 across Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh under the PMLA in a probe into an alleged recruitment fraud.
- Officials said they recovered bank records, sale deeds, loan agreements, investment details, handwritten notes, copies of fake job advertisements and digital evidence during the operations.
- The scam was first detected in Railways recruitment but is now suspected to have misused the names of more than 40 entities including RRB, India Post, the Income Tax Department, High Courts, PWD, Bihar departments, DDA and the Rajasthan Secretariat.
- According to the agency, the network issued forged appointment and joining letters via email IDs resembling official domains, ran bogus training centres, created fake identity cards and credited two to three months of salaries from accounts labeled like Treasury Office RO, FCI RO and RRB.
- The money-laundering case stems from a Sonpur GRPS FIR naming Deepak Kumar Tiwari and Saksham Srivastava, and investigators are now scrutinising communications, fund flows and the recruitment chain.