📰 From the news · Fake admission / seat promise
₹20 lakh and a forged admission letter handed over on a Mumbai campus: Kerala Crime Branch arrests medical-seat fraud accused after five years on the run, November 2025
Agents who prey on Kerala families seeking medical seats are rarely local. An arrest announced by Kerala Police on 19 November 2025 shows the typical shape of the fraud: advertisements placed in Delhi and Noida, a family in a Thiruvananthapuram district village, a promised seat at a private college in Mumbai, and five years before anyone was caught.
According to PTI, carried by ThePrint on 19 November 2025, a special Crime Branch team of Kerala Police tracked Prashant Agarwal, a native of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, to his home state and arrested him about five years after a case was registered against him. Police said he had posted prominent advertisements online and on social media, particularly in the Delhi and Noida regions, offering medical seats in colleges across India. In 2020 a man from Parasuvakkal in Thiruvananthapuram district paid about Rs 20 lakh for a promised seat at a private medical college in Mumbai; police said Agarwal met him on the college campus and handed over a forged admission letter. No admission followed.
Onmanorama reported the same day that the money was collected directly and through bank transfers, that the complaint was registered at Neyyattinkara police station in 2020 and later transferred to the Crime Branch for detailed investigation, and that the arrest was made by a special team led by DySP K Sajeev. The accused was produced before the Neyyattinkara JFCM-1 court and remanded to judicial custody for 14 days. Onmanorama described the operation as targeting families across India; neither report gave a number of victims or a total sum collected.
The detail that explains the fraud is where the letter was handed over. Meeting on the campus lent authenticity to a document the college had not issued. Nothing in either report suggests the family asked the college's admissions office to confirm the letter, or that any money reached the college. The second lesson is time: the complaint was filed in 2020 and the accused stayed at large for five years. Even a successful arrest rarely returns the money quickly, if at all.
Verify every admission letter with the college's admissions office, using contact details from the college's own website rather than from the letter or the agent. In India, MBBS seats, including management quota, are allotted through counselling by the MCC or the state authority; a letter that arrives outside that process should be treated as suspect. Pay fees only into the college's bank account, keep your original documents, and treat a request to meet on campus to collect a letter as a warning rather than a reassurance.
Were you affected by this case, or something like it? Report it with your own evidence, or tell your story — first-person accounts are what stop the next family.
This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.