Fraudsters fake govt agency website, invite job applications

NEW DELHI: Its website is adorned with pictures of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar and claims to be a central government agency under the agriculture ministry, but is just a fake version.

Claiming to be the Ministry of Agriculture's research arm, an organisation by the name of 'Central Agricultural Research Centre (CARC)' in Haryana has gone to the extent of conducting an entrance test on March 1, after advertising various job openings late last year, and has also announced the results.

However, the fraudulent activity has now caught the eyes of the actual research arm of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), which has said that the website seems to have been created to "cheat innocent people" by making it appear as the official website of a government agency.

"The intent of the above site is evidently to create an erroneous impression of its being an official website of a government agency and thereby cheat innocent people," the ICAR said.

Besides being identical in the URL address, the content on the CARC website has also been mostly copied from that of ICAR.