Prakasam Police Busts Interstate Fake JNTC Certificate Racket

ONGOLE: An interstate fake professional course certificate racket was busted by Prakasam police and seven people have been taken into custody on Saturday.

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 according to a leading daily.

The accused have been identified as Jampani Venkateshwarlu (49), Silarapu Bala Srinivasa Rao (53), S Sujatha (47), Koduri Pradeep Kumar alias Pradeep (32), Anaparthi Christopher (47) and Battapothula Venkateshwarlu (48), and 25-year-old Siddi Srinivas Reddy.

Prakasam superintendent of police (SP) Siddhartha Kaushal said Srinivasa Rao in 2017 opened a non-profit organisation, named Jawaharlal Nehru Technical Centre (JNTC), in Vizag. After that Venkateswarlu and Srinivasa Rao had launched a website claiming that JNTC was approved by the Union Labour Department to run professional courses.

Soon they started offering 584 courses in 15 subjects and issued fake certificates. They issued the certificates to job seekers for Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 per certificate.

With soaring popularity, more branches started coming up as the accused set up 115 branches in 11 districts in Andhra Pradesh. Rao and his wife even gave their franchisees on deposits of Rs 1-2 lakh.

They also opened up branches in nine other states, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu and issued a total of 2,237 fake certificates.

The SP said that the racket came into limelight based on a complaint by Ch Poornachandra Rao. He said that they have also asked concerned police departments to publicise that JNTC certificates are fake and are on the look out for those who have used these certificates to secure private or government jobs.