bhubaneswar the economic offences wing eow of the state crime branch which recently busted one of the biggest interstate job fraud rackets in the country arrested an it engineer from madhya pradesh on sunday for allegedly playing a key role in the crimethe accused has been identified as arpit panchal a resident of jaora in madhya pradesh the rackets mastermind zafar ahmed also a computer engineer was arrested on december 31 last year the gang comprising techsavvy engineers allegedly cheated at least 50000 job seekers to the tune of rs 25 crore in different states including odisha according to the eows inspector general ig j n pankaj panchal had developed some government lookalike websites offering employment for the purpose of duping job seekers panchal a bachelor in engineering in information technology is skilled in creating and designing websites and well conversant with at least four types of computer languages he is now employed with a private agency he in connivance with ahmed and other absconding fraudsters created and designed at least nine websites which looked like government ones issuing fake advertisements of government jobs mostly in health department pankaj saidthe probe agency has come to know that out of the nine websites the accused had used four in odisha by floating the advertisements and duped at least 12000 job seekers in the state alone by taking rs 30000 to rs 50000 from each candidate the remaining five websites were used to issue job advertisements in the regional language of different statesso far we have identified at least 22000 duped job seekers from odisha and gujarat the number of victims from other states like west bengal karnataka andhra pradesh and chhattisgarh is under verification pankaj said the gang flourished during covid period when the applicants were desperately looking for jobs especially in the health sector starting from drivers nurses to medical assistants to doctors more than 1000 fake sims were used for this scam the gang ran a call centre where they employed 50 people with a monthly salary of rs 15000 who worked for them to contact the applicants