📰 From the news · Fake admission / seat promise
Seats blocked, then resold: Karnataka's seat-blocking racket, the KEA's response, and why a "vacant seat in the last round" is the oldest trick in counselling
Seat blocking is a counselling fraud that works in any state where seats left unfilled in the final government round go back to the college to be sold under management quota. Karnataka's 2024 engineering counselling showed the mechanism in detail, and the state's medical counselling now carries rules written in response.
According to The Federal's explainer, during the 2024 Common Entrance Test counselling high-ranking candidates reserved seats in sought-after colleges but did not complete admission, keeping the seats out of reach until the final round; the seats were then returned to private colleges and, it was alleged, resold at high prices through the management quota. Shiksha reported the irregularities that surfaced: 53 students said their login credentials had been used without their knowledge to block seats, and investigators found that the IP addresses of more than 2,000 candidates had been exploited. The Karnataka Examinations Authority responded by barring students who had already taken seats at IITs and NITs from state counselling, and by introducing in-person identity verification with a confirmation slip and one-time password before an admission ticket is issued. Careers360 reported that for NEET-UG 2025 the authority warned that cancelling an allotted MBBS seat could cost a candidate up to Rs 12 lakh and that fake documents would bring criminal action.
Why a medical aspirant should read an engineering story. The racket is the same wherever seats revert to colleges: a broker "arranges" for a seat to be blocked in a government round, waits for it to fall to the college, and sells it to a family that was told the seat was "available only through us". The family pays for a seat that was public a month earlier. The tell is the promise of a specific seat at a specific college that the broker cannot show on any allotment list.
Protect your own login above all: in 2024 the seats blocked in other students' names were blocked with their credentials. And treat any offer of a "vacant management seat after the last round" as what the KEA's new rules exist to stop.
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.