Fake Campus Drives : A serious fraud, scam, scandal

Wikipedia says, India has 5672+ Engineering Colleges in India with top 3 being Andhra Pradesh (960), Tamil Nadu (934) and Maharashtra (739). Google says, nearly 1.5 Million Engineering students Pass Outs In India Every Year and very few of them get hired, the latter fact we we are already aware of.
As per Economics Times statistics, average students not getting job is approx 20-33% per year! Students end up enrolling in companies with very less package now a days. They do not have any other option available as they might have a burden of study loan, or any other financial issue at their home. Ratio of Students applying per post in Government sector and PSUs is increasing day by day.

Students have a dream of getting job ASAP when they approach towards their term end applying for any of the campus drive coming to their colleges. In many institutions, administration collects some amount of money towards Pre-placement preparation and organizing placement Drives. Students have blind faith on the placement cell, in turn any drive comes in colleges, students attend the same. Colleges also strive hard to arrange the same to make their placement record better and to attract new scholars for 1st year enrollment.
Taking advantage of the issues faced by students and also of colleges who want to have a tag of "Record Placement in the area", some ill-thinking firms have put their concentration of organizing fake campus drives in colleges. I want to narrate one incident from my college.

There was a notice of placement cell which reads, placement drive of X company from Aurangabad, Maharashtra will be organized and it is for Mechanical Engineering students. My seniors from same discipline attended the drive and even got selected. They were awaiting for the call latter from that firm for a long time. Even 6 months passed after they left the college, there was no intimation. They contacted the college placement cell, but no useful information except "Wait for some time, they will call you", "I talked with the HR, they have promised to schedule joining next month"! Finally, few of them, contacted the company registered office to inquire about call letter and to their surprise, company's registered officers told, they have never visited any college in Odisha (The college is in Odisha)! They could not do anything. There are number of such examples happening every year. My batch-mates also faced the same issue of fake campus drive. I am not sure about the fact though, but I have heard, suppose a company comes for drive with an aim of recruiting 10 students (let) with Y amount of money as salary per year, college administration requests them to take more number of candidates promising lesser amount of package per student. This increases the placement count for college. Some company also working as an outsourcing for some of the giants. They organize drive in the name of the those companies. When the call letter comes, students have no choice enrolling for the same (thinking, at-least this company is not a fake one).

Now the question comes, how the drive happens? Is it possible that college placement cell is unaware of this fraud? What happens to those firms who organize these types of fraud drives?
It is obvious that, Colleges attract 10+2 passed out students who want to peruse their career in Engineering showing them the placement results. It is strange that, almost every big colleges fill their posters and palm-plates with pictures of successfully places students in various companies. Some even claim there placement percentage is 90% or even more than that! (Actual fact is far from reality). Do parents or their wards ever inquire about the same? Never! I am not sure, but as per my knowledge, no government regulation is set up which gives the correct data.

Enrolling to these colleges is not less than trying luck in a lottery, as Student is enrolling in 2015-2019 batch seeing the placement records of 2015 batch. How can be someone of be so sure about the placement status after 4 years! The perfect example is, very less 2008-2012 batch students were enrolling in IT engineering, because there was recession at that time. But, when they passed out, picture was something different.

Here are few tips helping students judge whether the drive is a fake or not. Readers are requested to make amendment if any.

1. Company asking for money!
A usual scenarios, where company ask for some amount from the candidates towards bond. Be very alert about these firms. None of the companies ask its candidates to pay money towards bond.

2. Companies asking to write bond
Yes, some of them ask you to sign a bond on bond paper. Please make sure, you read each and every point and understand it properly. If you do not know any word's meaning, do not just assume the meaning, open a dictionary and understand the meaning and context for which the word is used. Do not worry, legitimate company will give enough time to read the contract and understand it properly.

3. Back door entry!
This is the term which many of the placement consultants using. Candidates are promised they would be placed in various companies paying a huge amount of money! This is a trap. Do not ever ever ever try this way!

4. Say No to the companies who want credit card or bank related information. Yes, it is OK to give PAN card and account number for your salary after you got placed.

5. The best and smartest way to find the information is from the website which is displayed in the placement drive notice. Just go to Whois Lookup, Domain Availability & IP Search - DomainTools website and enter the company website name and find the details when it was created. If the website is created recently, then you know what to do! 😀 Fake drives may be with some fake website names which resembles with the actual website name. Do some Google and avoid the drive if you find it suspicious.

6. Check with the company about the drive.
There is no wrong inquiring the company registered office about the drive conducting at your place. They will happily advise about the same. After all, their credibility is also an important factor for them if someone recruits with their name.

7. Make sure the copyright year at the bottom of the website page is up-to-date.

6. Go through the About Us page. It should be reassuring you about the company locations,staffs etc etc. A good About us page has below things.
Smaller company website also posses information on more or less same topics.

7. Go to Contact Us page, copy and paste the address in Google Map. If you do not find any information, you should be worried about the company's identity. Also, you can give a call to the number displayed there, if someone picks up the phone or just goes to a voice-mail. If there's no phone number, be wary. If a Contact Us page only has an online contact form, with no address or phone number, then also, it not good.

8. Is their Facebook page up to date and active?: if a website has a Facebook page, visit the page to see how often they update the page. Same funda applies for twitter handle.

"Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code covers offences relating to cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property, and leads to punishments of fines and/or jail terms of up to 7 years." Unfortunately, there is no adequate information available in internet about the complaints lodged against such fake drives!