Bhubaneswar, Sept. 21: Kharavela Nagar police today arrested two persons on charges of cheating more than 100 engineering students of various colleges in the city by making them false job promises.

The accused, Rajiv Nair and Ankur Rampal, both in their 40s, hail from Mohali in Punjab. Police said the duo had cheated more than 100 students from around 10 engineering colleges. They offered the students jobs after holding on and off-campus selection programmes.

However, when the selected students went to join work, they found that the company in whose name they had been offered jobs was fake.

“After the students complained to us about the false promises made by the company, we called Nair over phone as he had come during the campus selection. We lured them by asking them to recruit more students of our college. When they came here and stayed in a hotel in Kharavela Nagar, we informed the local police about their fraudulent activities,” said Prakash Paital, training and placement officer of the Gandhi Institute for Technology.

He added that 12 students of his college had been recruited by the fraudsters, who had applied to the college to hold a campus selection on behalf of Nanda Technology Group of Companies. Paital said the company had taken Rs 20,000 from each student to provide them with jobs.

Satya Narayan Nayak, a student of Sudhananda Engineering and Research Centre (SERC), a private engineering college in Phulnakhara, lodged a formal complaint with Kharavela Nagar police following which the duo were arrested from the hotel.

Besides these two engineering colleges, the accused have cheated students from eight more engineering colleges in the city. They have taken more than Rs 40 lakh from these colleges on the promise of providing good jobs to young engineering job aspirants. Each college had provided Rs 4 to 5 lakh to the duo to recruit their students.

The complainant said that when the students went to Mohali to join duty, they were surprised to see the situation there.

“We were promised jobs with salaries of Rs 20,000 per month. The company people had said that it was a growing company in the field of technology with a 200-strong work force in Mohali. When we reached there, we found hardly 10 people working at the address they had provided us. These employees were not even being paid properly,” said Nayak.

Even the website of the company showed that it had a global presence with offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

“The offer letter made us dream big, but when we faced the reality we were shattered. We wanted our money back,” said one of the students.

Officials at the Kharavela Nagar police station said they were verifying the documents of the duo.

“We have registered a case against these people. We nabbed Nair after he confessed to his crime. We are verifying the role of the other suspect,” said a senior police officer.