Across Rajasthan’s Jhalawar district and beyond, a sophisticated racket stealthily redirected money meant for the poor. It reportedly ran on stolen Aadhaar details. It forged certificates. What’s more, it didn’t cease to compromise government portals. The nexus ran for years before anyone noticed.
The scam reportedly surfaced last year. Jhalawar police received a tip-off that a man named Ashiq Ali was allegedly defrauding government schemes in the district’s Kamkheda area.
According to a report, SP Amit Kumar filed a complaint with the Cyber Police Station and assigned cyber investigator Ravi Sen to dig in.
What Sen and constable Sumit Kumar found went far beyond one fraudster. Nine suspicious bank accounts and transactions linked to a single mobile number revealed a sprawling operation. And multiple accounts, across different schemes, credited on the same day.
In one case, a single account received pension deposits 50 times on March 10, 2022, alone.
Operation Shutterdown
The scale of the fraud triggered ‘Operation Shutterdown’ in mid-October 2025. The Special Operations Group of the state police has since taken it over.
So far, 51 people have been arrested, including government officials. Electronic devices, luxury vehicles, and cash worth more than Rs 3 crore have been seized.
Over 11,000 bank accounts have been flagged as suspicious. A chargesheet has been filed against 48 key accused.
The financial damage is staggering. Investigators have established at least Rs 14.81 crore in misappropriation under PM-Kisan.
Fraudulent transfers under the Rajasthan Disaster Management Information System amount to Rs 3.62 crore.
A similar figure has been illegally siphoned from the Rajasthan pension scheme in Jhalawar alone. Sensitive data of around 99 lakh people was reportedly found with the accused.
Officials have a name for this parallel structure: a “cyber sarkar.”
The schemes and the gaps
The racket began by identifying which welfare schemes were easiest to exploit. PM-Kisan was among the first targets.
Its initial eligibility conditions were described by investigators as lax. There was no cap on beneficiaries within a family. No requirement of separate land records. No restriction on applying from outside the state.
Applications not processed within a stipulated time were auto-approved.
Village-level e-mitra operators and Common Service Centre workers played a central role. They had access to residents’ personal data across gram panchayats and personally knew many of them, Sen told a section of the media.
A critical loophole made the scheme especially lucrative. Under PM-Kisan, all pending instalments from the date of a beneficiary’s registration are transferred at once when the account is linked to direct benefit transfer.
Accounts inactive for two to three years were therefore eligible for a substantial lump sum. It was then divided among the fictitious beneficiary, the middleman, and the agent.
Scamsters also registered residents of Manohar Thana in neighbouring states (Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh) for a commission, exploiting the auto-approval still active in some states at the time.
As word spread, a criminal gang began to take shape.
Even after these loopholes were plugged, the network adapted quickly, exploiting remaining flaws in the scheme, an investigator has noted.
The pension scheme: fake disabilities and diverted accounts
The Rajasthan Social Security Pension Scheme (RajSSP) provides monthly financial assistance, currently a minimum of Rs 1,300, to the elderly, widows, single women, small farmers, and persons with disabilities.
Investigators say e-mitras lured ineligible individuals with promises of benefits, collected their personal data, and fabricated disability certificates, using fake doctor seals in some cases.
Application IDs were then generated on the web portal.
An operator at Jhalawar’s Chief Medical and Health Officer office allegedly collected applicant details using the mobile number allotted to that office, which was used to receive OTPs for verifying disability certificates.
He and several associates have since been arrested, the report claimed. Personnel at local Tehsildar and Block Development Offices further helped circumvent physical verification processes.
The numbers reveal the extent of the manipulation. In Aklera and Manohar Thana in Jhalawar, 19,987 persons were reportedly registered to receive social security pension on grounds of disability.
The 2011 Census puts Rajasthan’s disabled population at around 2.4%. In certain pockets covered by the scam, investigators say, nearly two-thirds of the registered population was shown to be disabled.
In one case, a man, his wife, and both his parents were all drawing disability pension while being fully able-bodied, and had additionally obtained two scooters under a government scheme.
The gang also targeted accounts where pension payments had been returned to the treasury due to errors — wrong IFSC codes, closed accounts, or incorrect details. Members would obtain the list of such cases and simply update the records with their own account numbers, or those of relatives and acquaintances.
Investigators say they have traced at least 51,000 fraudulent Pension Payment Orders. In many instances, pension is technically being received, but the money is going to someone else’s account, before it was transferred to the Special Operations Group.
The crop loss scheme: patwaris, passwords, and bypass links
The third scheme targeted was the Disaster Management Information System, which compensates farmers for crop loss caused by natural calamities. Verification rests with local land revenue officers and patwaris.
When data discrepancies caused farmer records to be sent back to the Patwari’s ID for correction, the criminals moved in. They obtained Single Sign-On credentials (whether through hacking is still under investigation) and substituted their own account details.
A bypass link for the DMIS portal was recovered from seized devices.
In some cases, eligible farmers’ details were replaced with those of the accused or their relatives.
Agents also collected documents from ineligible farmers and used them to make fraudulent claims. Investigators revealed the accused specifically targeted areas where crops had been affected by bad weather.
The scale of the fraud is evident in subsequent audits. A physical verification of DMIS beneficiaries by the Jhalawar District Collector found about 42.85% of the data to be invalid. A similar audit by Tonk’s Land Revenue Department put the figure at over 90%.
In one case, the same mobile number was linked to three bank accounts belonging to two different people, used to avail scheme benefits between 2021 and 2025.
Bihari Lal Goyal, 32, from Manohar Thana, has been identified as the alleged mastermind of the DMIS component.
Material related to the DMIS portal, including links, passwords, details of thousands of suspicious accounts, and questionable transactions, was allegedly recovered from him.
The network behind the fraud
At the centre of the broader operation were two men from Dausa, named Rajulal Saini and Ramavtar Saini, according to the report.
Ramavtar, a 28-year-old former sugarcane juice seller, was identified as the principal mastermind.
Investigators have admitted to being surprised by his detailed knowledge of intricate government systems.
He allegedly recruited people with knowledge of e-services and deployed them to villages and towns to identify vulnerable individuals.
He is suspected to have had at least 16 agents, each running their own network of sub-agents.
Data collected from the field was compiled by three operators and passed to Vikram Saini through his aide Naresh Saini.
Vikram was the technical expert. He allegedly used tools including the application Burp Suite to identify flaws in PM-Kisan’s central node, breach passwords, approve ineligible accounts, and create official IDs at the state, district, and tehsil level.
Ramavtar had 14 bank accounts linked to his number, including two in the names of relatives. In many cases, once money was transferred, the accounts were deactivated.
Mohammad Laiq, chief operator of PM-Kisan’s Rajasthan nodal office, was also arrested. He allegedly created district nodal IDs for private individuals and approved bulk data using the state nodal ID.
Among his alleged accomplices who have been arrested are a Dudu-based individual who operated nodal IDs for districts, a staffer at the Phalodi Collectorate, and individuals from Bharatpur and Dausa.
The raids
On the night of October 22, 2025, SP Amit Kumar reportedly coordinated simultaneous raids across Jhalawar, Dausa, and Dudu districts in Rajasthan, and Rajgarh in Madhya Pradesh.
Thirty accused were arrested over roughly 70 hours.
A reward of Rs 25,000 each was announced for Vikram Saini and Naresh Saini. Both were arrested from Dausa in November.
The human face of the scam
Thousands of individuals were drawn into the scheme across Rajasthan, many as willing participants lured by the promise of easy money, others without their knowledge.
Some were approached by agents offering a share of government scheme proceeds in exchange for their Aadhaar details. Others found money in their accounts without having applied for anything, while a few proactively reported the deposits to authorities and had the amounts subsequently debited.
In several cases, individuals received amounts under schemes for which they were ineligible, including PM-Kisan, which is meant for landholding farmer families, and the social security pension scheme.
Some claimed ignorance of the illegality; others admitted to spending their share.
The tip of the iceberg
Investigators acknowledge that without the initial tip-off, the scam would likely have continued undetected.
Those illegally receiving government money had little reason to complain, an investigator has pointed out. Many cases were quietly closed once irregular accounts were shut down.
Ramavtar has since told police that Vikram alone had 40 people like him working across districts.
SP Kumar, when asked about the full scale of the fraud, has said he cannot provide an estimate. Only one module has been caught, he reportedly said, adding that there are perhaps many similar ones operating across the state and the country.
Also Read: Congress Flags MGNREGA, Other Schemes As Corruption Hotspots, Warns Of More Scams https://www.vibesofindia.com/congress-flags-mgnrega-other-schemes-as-corruption-hotspots-warns-of-more-scams/
