CBI chargesheets three persons in connection with SSC paper leak

Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday filed charge sheet against three individuals who were arrested in connection with the 2017 Staff Selection Commission (SSC) paper leak case.

The central probe agency chargesheeted Sandeep Mathur, Dharmender and Akshay Kumar Malik, who were all arrested on June 4, in connection with the case.

"Akshay was the mastermind of the scam and used to leak the paper while the other two used to lure candidates. They are private persons and are not linked to Sify Technology Pvt. Ltd.," CBI sources had told ANI during the time of the arrest.

"The CBI had on May 22, 2018, registered a Regular Case (RC) against certain private persons including candidates, officials of the Noida (Uttar Pradesh)-based private technology company and unknown officials of the SSC and other unknown persons on the allegations of criminal conspiracy, 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 agency said in a statement.

The charges mentioned were 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), section 13(2) read with 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 and section 66D of the Information Technology Act.

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

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

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

"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 PCs of the candidates. These candidates were allegedly helped by the unknown persons i.e. the agents in solving questions," the CBI statement read.

It was also alleged that screenshots of some of the questions of the CGL Tier-II Exam, 2017 were leaked on social media and had gone viral.

The CBI had earlier conducted Preliminary Enquiry (PE) on a complaint from the Staff Selection Commission, New Delhi on the allegations of malpractices in the recruitment examinations conducted by it.