Bhubaneswar, Feb 18 (IANS): The economic offences wing (EOW) of the Odisha Police has busted an inter-state job fraud racket that was operating in 17 states including Odisha, and arrested the mastermind from Bihar, the police said on Saturday.

The accused has been identified as Dharampal Singh.

The racket was operating under the name of "Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan".

Inspector General, EOW, Jay Narayan Pankaj said: "The scamsters had developed a website resembling a government website."

The fraud organisation has a registered office in Delhi, and other offices in Mumbai, Bhopal and Dehradun.

It has duped the job aspirants of Rs 6.6 crore, he said.

The amounts collected from the candidates were deposited in different accounts managed by Dharampal Singh, Pankaj said.

He further said that the scamsters were using six to seven shell companies for routing and laundering the ill-gotten money, and also routed the money through a Mumbai-based film production company, Sumitra Production.

Pankaj said the Gramin Rojgar Kalyan Sansthan invited applications for various jobs like district and block coordinator, computer operator, block surveyor etc., prescribing the educational qualifications and the remuneration for the individual posts.

The advertisement also contained the name of the website www.grks.org.

To gain the confidence of the job aspirants, they also offered reservations and concessional fee as it is done for government jobs, he added.