NDTV deletes its report that promoted a fraudulent Indian employment portal
by Thoughtfox staff
On July 16 (Saturday), India-based NDTV quietly pulled down from its website a report that had been promoting a fraudulent employment portal. The report was hosted on this URL: https://ndtv.in/jobs/sarva-shiksha-abhiyan-recruitment-2022-last-date-for-teaher-chaprasi-and-ssa-lab-technician-apply-online-at-samagrashiksha.org-3138934, whose screenshot can be seen below:
If you click on that URL now, you would find an error alert, whose cropped screenshot is this:
NDTV’s unapologetic action followed an evolving social-media alert regarding that fake portal—which remains operational even now, and can be accessed at this URL (as on July 19): https://samagrashiksha.org/index.php. This portal is suspected to have scammed a large number of unwitting job applicants into depositing hundreds of thousands of rupees as application fee.
One individual who was lucky enough to have prevented himself from making a deposit to the website shared his experience with Thoughtfox on the condition of anonymity; his narration, presented below, has been edited for clarity and context:
While reading about the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan scheme for my state government exams, I came across the NDTV news article about an employment drive for 1,05,560 school teachers called the “Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Recruitment 2022.” I couldn’t help but wonder how such an unusually large number of vacancies could have been advertised by just one state; but the alternative that these vacancies were distributed across the states also seemed untenable because the number would have been too small for all of India’s states put together. My other suspicions were as follows:
The website did not display a copy of the official notification for the advertised vacancies.
The recruitment fee the website demands was unusually high—INR 990; moreover, while this type of fee is usually lower for candidates from the SC/ST categories and is mentioned, I didn’t see it on this website.
Nevertheless, I filled out the form because government bodies in India have been charging high application fees through the past few years. It took me 20 minutes altogether to upload my photograph and type in my details—my name, address, date of birth, and signature; but as the minutes were piling on, so I was getting anxious that I might not be able to submit my details because Indian governments’ recruitment portals tend to have a strict window of time within which an application has to be submitted. On this portal, though, I never received a time-window warning even though I was away from my keyboard for 10 minutes at one point.
Anyway, when the final—payment—page came up, it indicated no option for UPI [Unified Payments Interface]; moreover, this word—RTGS [Real Time Gross Settlement]—was mentioned. It occurred to me at that point that the minimum amount for RTGS is a little over 2 Lakhs. Well, the moment I realized all that, I terminated my form-filling process, and began looking for information about this website on YouTube.
Fortunately, there were a couple of YouTube channels I found that claim that this recruitment portal is fraudulent. One of the YouTube channels even checked the validity period for the domain—which is just 1 year, and the domain is purchased from GoDaddy.
I hope that other potential victims come to know about this ongoing fraud via my input to Thoughtfox—and they remain alert while filing online applications in the future as well.
A screenshot of the fraudulent portal samagrashiksha.org
Thoughtfox did searches of its own on the Internet, and discovered that NDTV itself had reported on March 28 a warning issued by the Government of India’s Ministry of Education regarding this URL (as well as similar ones). In that report, NDTV had stated the following: ‘The websites, according to the ministry, trying "to dupe innocent applicants" include www.sarvashiksha.online, https://samagra.shikshaabhiyan.co.in and https://shikshaabhiyan.org.in.’
It is unclear why NDTV would end up promoting precisely one such portal around three and a half months after publishing its own report on the government’s warning about it.
Meanwhile, even though the Ministry of Education had done its bid to alert the public about such websites, it is obvious that such a minuscule step on its part has failed to protect innocent unemployed applicants to its schemes from getting duped: Indeed it failed to protect even one of the most prominent news networks—NDTV, that is—from getting misled.
Nor is it any consolation to the thousands of struggling Indians who may have lost their deposits to this website that it still exists on the Internet—even as their Ministry of Education would show a rather cavalier attitude toward their (and future) victims’ plight via this statement (which NDTV had included in its March 28 report):
A screenshot of the payment desk (with RTGS highlighted in yellow and encircled in red) of the fraudulent portal samagrashiksha.org
The Ministry’s lack of initiative in getting these fake websites removed not only puts it in a negative light but it also shows its weak commitment to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public stress on ‘Digital India’ and digital governance.
Thoughtfox has reached out both to NDTV and India’s Ministry of Education for further comments on this issue. Their responses would be added to this report once and if they arrive.
Meanwhile, Thoughtfox readers might be interested in watching this pioneering YouTube-based exposé, in Hindi, of the fraudulent website in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arIuxCLCGBw
That exposé was published on February 22—more than a month ahead of the NDTV’s report on the warning issued by the Ministry of Education against these fake websites—on a channel called The hssc adda, which has 113K+ subscribers (as on July 19).