Nine impersonators, eighteen biometric staff and forged Aadhaar cards: the solver gang caught at Lakhisarai during the NEET UG re-exam of 21 June 2026

NEET UG is the single gateway to every MBBS seat in India, and 2026 was the year the system was tested twice. According to Medical Dialogues, the 3 May paper was cancelled after a leak and a re-examination was held on 21 June; Business Today reported that more than 20 lakh aspirants sat the retest. In Bihar's Lakhisarai district the re-exam itself became the target, and, according to police, some of the people paid to stop impersonation were part of the scheme.

According to the Free Press Journal (23 June 2026), Lakhisarai police arrested 30 people: nine impersonators, 18 employees of the biometric verification company, two helpers and one candidate from Nalanda district. Business Today, reporting a day earlier, had put the figure at 24. Sub-divisional magistrate Prabhakar Kumar told the Free Press Journal that police had information that suspicious individuals might sit the exam, and that a young man in the queue at the Government High School centre in Hasanpur was put through biometric verification several times. Raids followed at KRK Higher Secondary School and Kendriya Vidyalaya, and superintendent of police Prerna said phones and documents were recovered. Police said an MBBS student from PMCH Patna (reports differ on whether he was in his third or fourth year) had entered the Hasanpur centre posing as a biometric company employee, in collusion with a company staffer, and that his questioning led police first to the biometric employees and then to the impersonators. Those arrested included students of AIIMS Rae Bareli, UCMS Delhi, New Jalpaiguri Medical College, ANMMCH Gaya, Government Medical College Satna, NMCH Patna, a government ayurvedic college in Odisha and a BHU nursing student, and police said the solvers had agreed to sit for genuine candidates for Rs 30 lakh to Rs 40 lakh. Both outlets reported that investigators regard Arpit Raj, an ANMCH Gaya student arrested as a helper who had been questioned by the CBI during the 2024 leak inquiry, as one of the masterminds, and Business Today noted that colleges had told students not to leave campus during the exam period.

On 27 June Medical Dialogues reported that the case had been handed to Bihar's Economic Offences Unit. Police said about 200 dummy candidates, mostly MBBS students, had been recruited from eight states, that the accused had told them the gang contacted more than 200 aspirants before the exam, and that the racket could have earned up to Rs 50 crore; biometric staff were reportedly paid Rs 20,000 for each fake candidate let through. The NTA's biometric contractor, EDCIL, had subcontracted the work to a firm that Medical Dialogues said had previously been blacklisted in Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

The mechanism, as police described it to Medical Dialogues, was that genuine candidates' biometrics were captured outside the centre while impersonators inside distorted their thumb impressions; when the machine rejected them, company staff used a manual bypass, and forged Aadhaar cards covered the identity check. The safeguard that was supposed to be tamper-proof failed because the people operating it had, according to police, been bought.

For a family, the lesson is that anyone offering a solver or a guaranteed rank for lakhs is offering a criminal case: the candidate from Nalanda was arrested alongside the gang. Pay only exam and counselling fees to the NTA and MCC, verify results on their official sites, and treat any demand for advance cash as the scam it is.