Mobile-Led Exam Leak Busted: Candidate Jailed At Badrunnesa, Seven Nabbed

Unraveling an organized digital racket leveraging smartphones and encrypted messaging channels to compromise public recruitment examinations, law enforcement authorities have sentenced an examinee to one month in prison and arrested seven syndicate members, including five government employees. Operating via counterfeit WhatsApp identities, the racket distributed question scripts and answer sheets via smartphones, demanding between Tk 8 lakh and Tk 10 lakh per applicant through signed bank checks and judicial stamp bonds.

On Friday, 16 October 2026, during the recruitment test for the post of Assistant Youth Development Officer at the Begum Badrunnesa Government Girls' College center in Dhaka, invigilators caught 25-year-old examinee Reshma Akter transmitting photographs of the test paper via her mobile phone. An executive mobile court headed by Assistant Commissioner and Executive Magistrate Md. Aminul Islam of the Lalbagh Revenue Circle summarily tried the candidate, handing down a one-month simple imprisonment and confiscating her mobile handset, confirmed Md. Nur Alam, Public Relations Officer of the Ministry of Youth and Sports. The convicted candidate hails from Rajarhat upazila in Kurigram.

Simultaneously, the Special Response Battalion (SRB-3) dismantled the wider mobile communications infrastructure behind the breach. Disclosing findings at a press briefing held at the SRB Media Centre in Karwan Bazar on Friday afternoon, SRB-3 Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel Fayezul Arefin confirmed the arrest of seven syndicate operatives in targeted raids conducted across Dhaka and Savar between 14 and 16 October.

The arrested individuals include Department of Environment data entry operator Md. Rubel Islam (33), job seeker Md. Mafijul Islam (23), Md. Hasinur Rahman Sujan (32), National Board of Revenue (NBR) computer operator S M Imdadul Islam (35), Ministry of Defence office assistant Asadul Islam (33), NBR office assistant Nur Mohammad (30), and NBR computer operator Jahangir (38). Recovered evidentiary materials include eight smartphones used to distribute test telemetry, one set of question papers, 116 judicial stamps valued at Tk 100, four Tk 50 stamps, 19 admit card slips, 10 educational certificates, 15 testimonial papers, 48 bank check leaves, one signed bank check, six National Identity Cards, and Tk 4,000 in cash.

Official sources noted that the recruitment screening for 242 vacant posts was slated for 10 October, attracting 319,000 candidates nationwide. Although scheduled for an 11:00 AM start, authorities abruptly postponed the nationwide examination at 10:03 AM after electronic breaches were verified. Following an official complaint filed by the Department of Youth Development at Motijheel Police Station on 11 October, SRB-3 initiated an intelligence-led shadow investigation.

Digital forensic inspection of seized mobile logs established that Nur Mohammad first received a low-resolution snapshot of the question paper on his phone at 4:43 AM on 10 October. Subsequently, Jahangir transmitted a clear, high-resolution image to his handset at 6:15 AM. Nur Mohammad formulated the answer keys on his device and forwarded the solutions via WhatsApp to Jahangir and Imdadul. Operatives Asadul, Rubel, Mafijul, and Sujan then pushed the questions and solutions directly to candidate phones. Investigators revealed that Mafijul joined the syndicate after previously falling victim to recruitment fraud, and evidence suggests the network was also implicated in university admission rackets.

Lieutenant Colonel Fayezul Arefin stated that while the suspects claim to have procured the papers via Facebook groups, investigators view the claim with skepticism and are scrutinizing accounts to trace the primary source of the leak. While no direct complicity of Department of Youth Development personnel has surfaced, the involvement of active employees from other government ministries remains under rigorous multi-agency investigation, official sources confirmed.

//DBTech/DPOBT/SMP/MIST//