The East Zone Task Force, City Police, arrested 3 men for cloning the fingerprints of faculty members across Hyderabad’s educational institutes, on Wednesday evening.
Anjani Kumar, Commissioner, Hyderabad City Police, said, “The Commissioner’s Task Force, East Zone Team, Hyderabad city has arrested three persons who were involved in illegal preparation and selling of cloned fingerprints to faculty members of various educational institutions and tweaking the online biometric attendance illegally.”
The gang of three committing the crime includes Sudarshan Reddy, Vice Principal, Vivekananda Group of Institutions, with B. Ramakrishna, an assistant professor at the Swarnandhra College of Engineering and Technology (SCET) and Sriram Prasad, an engineering graduate.
Recently, the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) officials and the Government of Telangana introduced a mandatory biometric attendance, linked with Aadhaar Card.
According to the guidelines by the JNTU, all the universities are required to maintain a 1:15 student and faculty ratio, especially the engineering colleges of Telangana.
The group of three started a business and used to sell cloned fingerprints to the faculties of different universities to escape the biometric system of attendance.
After interrogating the accused, the police said, the mastermind behind the plan was B. Ramakrishna.
B. Ramakrishna designed a technique of cloning fingerprints with the help of internet and the other two accused used to get clients from various universities to sell the cloned fingerprints. The accused sold each cloned fingerprint for Rs. 4,000.
The police seized all the materials used to commit the crime, such as the cloning machine, a glue gun, the cloned prints and more. The accused are under arrest and an investigation is in progress.
