Kanpur Police announced in May 2026 that they had uncovered a pan-India fake degree racket supplying forged educational certificates — including PhD, law, pharmacy, postgraduate, and school-level documents — to candidates who never appeared for any examination whatsoever.DOCUMENTED
The operation's marketing framing — described by police as a "home delivery" service — is itself notable, borrowing the language of ordinary e-commerce convenience for a criminal forgery operation, a branding choice that suggests the operators understood their customers were seeking a low-friction, low-visibility transaction rather than a genuine academic credential.REVIEWED
- Two alleged operators were arrested: a man identified as Manish alias Ravi, of Hyderabad, and Arjun Yadav, of Unnao — a joint operation spanning two different states rather than a single-location scheme.
- Raids seized nearly 80 fake migration certificates, forged marksheets and degrees, counterfeit university seals, laptops, and phones allegedly containing digital records linked to thousands of beneficiaries.
- Forged documents carried the names of several real institutions, including Lingaya's Vidyapeeth, Mangalayatan University, JS University, Glocal University, Sikkim Professional University, and Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University.
- Police allege the group forged the seal of a deputy registrar at CSJM University specifically to issue bogus migration certificates, a document type typically required when a student transfers between institutions.
- The operation is described by police as active for "several years" before detection, and investigators are separately probing the financial transactions associated with the racket.
A parallel, not identical, operation
This case is distinct from the much larger Kerala racket Watchdog Journal previously reported on — different operators, different states of origin, and a smaller seizure count of roughly 80 documents versus the nearly 100,000 seized in Kerala — but it uses recognizably similar mechanics: forged seals precise enough to pass routine inspection, a distribution model built around convenience framed explicitly as "delivery," and a client base seeking credentials for employment and admissions purposes rather than any genuine academic achievement.REVIEWED
The involvement of multiple named universities as the targets of forgery — rather than a single institution — indicates the operators built a general-purpose forgery capability adaptable to whatever specific credential a given customer requested, rather than specializing narrowly in documents from one school.
What the pattern of separate networks suggests
Taken alongside the Kerala case and a separate Delhi operation covered elsewhere on this site, the pattern suggests fake-credential supply in India is fragmented across multiple independent regional networks rather than concentrated in a single dominant organization — a structure that makes the overall market considerably harder to shut down through any one enforcement action, since dismantling one network, however large, leaves the others operating unaffected. Each of these three cases was detected and prosecuted independently by different regional police forces, with no indication in available reporting that the networks were coordinated with one another.
Sources behind this report
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