CGL examinaton lekage 2017: CBI arrests three

The CBI has arrested three persons in connection with its ongoing investigation relating to leakage in online Combined Graduate Level (CGL) examination 2017 conducted by Staff Selection Commission (SSC), the agency said on Thursday.

The Central probe agency also conducted searches at four places, including Delhi and Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, which led to the recovery of incriminating documents.

The arrested accused --identified as Sandeep Mathur, Dharmender and Akshay Kumar -- were produced before the Special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) judge which sent them to the agency's custody till June 10.

The CBI on May 22, 2018 registered the case against certain private persons including candidates, officials of Uttar Pradeh's Noida-based private technology company and unknown officials of SSC and other unknown persons on the allegations of criminal conspiracy cheating, criminal misconduct by the public servants and cheating by personation by using computer resources with regard to conduct of online CGL Tier-II examination, 2017. 

The SSC had conducted the online examination in August 2017 for the CGL Tier-I examination, 2017. Those candidates who cleared the cut off list of the Tier-I Examination appeared for the online CGL Tier-II examination 2017 in February 2018, which was scheduled from February 17, 2018 to February 22, 2018. 

For conducting this examination, SSC had executed an agreement with the Noida-based Private Technologies Company for outsourcing.

According to the agreement, the CBI said, the private company was entrusted to conduct the computer mode examination and was also responsible for identification and preparation of test centres across India, preparation of adequate number of questions for making sets of the question paper, capturing biometric and photograph of candidate's registration and CCTV recording of each examination lab. 

The company was also responsible to block the computers of the candidates from any access to all possible web resources for browsing, chatting, said the CBI. 

It was further alleged that the computers of some candidates were remotely accessed by unknown persons with the help of software which was not supposed to be installed in the Personal Computers of the candidates. These candidates were allegedly helped by the unknown persons (agent/solvers) in solving questions, the CBI said. 

"It was also alleged that screen shots of some of the questions of the CGL Tier-II Exam, 2017 were leaked on social media and had gone viral. The answer keys of the Quantitative Ability (QA) examination dated February 21, 2018 were also allegedly found on social media such as on the Facebook page of SSCTUBE at 10.10 a.m. on February 21, 2018, while this examination was scheduled to be held at 10.30 a.m. on that day. 

"Searches were also conducted on May 23, 2018 at various premises of the identified labs and official premises of the private company and the accused in Delhi, Noida, Mumbai, Chennai, Shimla, Jaipur and Patna," the agency said. 

The CBI had earlier conducted preliminary enquiry on a complaint from the SSC on the allegations of malpractices in the recruitment examinations for CGL (Tier-II), including alleged leakage of question papers, deficiency observed in the conduct of the examination by the service provider and other related issues.IANS