People posing as agents of professional colleges cheat students of as much as Rs 100 crore every year by promising seats in various educational institutes, police revealed even as parents gear up to get their children admitted to engineering and medical courses.
“My assumption is that innocent parents give away at least Rs100 crore to fake agents. Last year alone, the proprietor of a professional college in the city repaid several parents more than Rs 8 crore that had been swindled by agents from parents promising admission for their children,” a police official who is familiar with such complaints told Deccan Chronicle.
There are numerous advertisements pasted on city buses, claiming that admission can be ensured in several deemed universities, including SRM, Vels and Sathyabama, as well as private engineering colleges, despite a student getting low marks.
On Monday, Prof. N Sethuraman, the registrar of SRM University, lodged a complaint with Chennai city police that the university has come across several fake websites, names of illegal agents, individuals and companies, all whom claim to be agents of SRM University.
“We have not appointed anybody to act as our agents and our admission is done only at our offices,” he said. “These fake agents boast of contacts with people at the highest levels of management in reputed engineering and medical colleges to convince parents and collect huge amounts of money as capitation fee. Certain colleges employ agents and give them commission on the basis of a percentage, in many cases fake agents collect lakhs of rupees and gobble it up,” police said.
When this correspondent contacted one such agent, he was told that he could get a seat in any of the private engineering colleges. “It is difficult to get a mechanical seat as there is a lot of demand but we can get you a computer science seat for less ‘donation’”, the agent said.
Often, parents become aware that they have been cheated only after six months. “The agents keep saying that they will arrange the admission and one fine day they switch off their mobile phones and disappear. That is when parents realise that they have been taken for a ride and approach the police,” the official said.
Last year, the police had made a few arrests based on complaints by parents.