The agency tracked Mr. Dahiya to his hideout in Gurugram. On Saturday, he was produced before a special court that sent him to five-day CBI custody.
In October 2022, the agency had arrested a Russian hacker named Mikhail Shargin in the same case. He was held at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on arrival from Kazakhstan’s Almaty. The accused had helped the others in hacking into the software on which the examination was conducted.
The agency had then said that some foreign nationals were involved in compromising many online examinations, including the JEE (Mains) test.
The CBI registered the case on September 1, 2021, against Affinity Education Private Limited, its directors, employees and others. They were accused of helping the candidates secure admission to top National Institutes of Technology by solving the question paper via remote access from an examination centre in Haryana’s Sonepat.
The accused collected the original Class X and XII mark sheets of the willing candidates, their user IDs and passwords and post-dated cheques as security. After the confirmation of admissions, they reportedly received commissions ranging from Rs 12 to Rs 15 lakh per candidate.
The CBI had earlier conducted searches in the national capital region, Pune, Jamshedpur, Indore and Bengaluru and seized 25 laptops, multiple personal computers and 30 post-dated cheques. It also arrested several accused, including two directors and four employees of Affinity Education.
Last year, in relation to the same case, a Russian hacker was arrested who was identified as Mikhail Shargin.
Many screenshots of questions said to be from the Joint Engineering Examination (JEE) Main 2021 paper went viral on social media platforms a few minutes after the exam began.
Candidates who took the exam said the questions were like the ones leaked on Thursday. Another candidate said students are not allowed to take any electronic devices, including mobile phones, to the exam centers. It appeared to him that a photo of the questions on the desktop was clicked during the exam.
That was the second round of JEE Main exam that began on March 16 and ended on Thursday. Around 60,000 students appeared for the second cycle across Bihar in six cities, including 22 centers in Patna.
