4 minute readjaipurJune 22, 2026 03:01 PM (IST)
In a rare case, a mining engineer in Rajasthan used artificial intelligence (AI) to hack into the Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC) portal and literally ‘delete’ candidates for government jobs.
According to Ajmer Police, 27-year-old Rahul Kumar Meena has removed the names of three contestants from the provisional list of the 2024 Mining Engineers Examination to improve their chances.
Shamsher Khan, deputy SP of Cyber Police Station, Ajmer, said they received a complaint from RPSC deputy director, analyst and programmer Raghuveer Gurjar regarding tampering with the RPSC recruitment portal for the 2024 exam.
Officials said the tentative list issued in July 2025 had 78 candidates for 24 vacancies. Out of the 24 vacancies, there is one vacancy in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category. Here, six ST candidates had made it to the provisional list against one vacancy.
To improve his chances, Rahul Meena, who ranks second in this ST list, withdrew the application of Ashish Meena, the first candidate just above him in the merit list. However, the names of two more candidates, the fourth and sixth, were withdrawn from the list due to concerns about arousing suspicion.
Mr Khan said he had sent SMS to all three candidates informing them that their applications had been withdrawn as requested. “One of them, Ravi, approached the RPSC asking how his application was withdrawn when he had not withdrawn it, after which the RSCP informed the Department of Information Technology and Communications (DoIT&C), which manages the RPSC’s recruitment portal,” he said.
Officials said that once the application was withdrawn, the option to withdraw it was closed. Investigation revealed that the same single sign-on (SSO) identity was used to take down all three applications. SSO is a unique digital ID issued by the Government of Rajasthan to all registered citizens, businesses and government employees.
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This SSO ID is said to be fake and was created under the name Rahul Sinha. Investigators found that the applicant, Rahul Meena, also created login credentials using the same IP address.
Further investigation revealed that the IP address was from a Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) facility in Jharkhand. “Investigation revealed that Rahul Meena was working at SAIL in Jharkhand since 2019, the same place where the application was withdrawn,” DSP Khan said.
arrest
Once it was confirmed that Rahul was the person they were looking for, investigators began searching for him in his hometown of Dausa. Later, to catch Meena, a police constable called her brother posing as a courier and told her that he would send the courier back if he did not give Rahul’s exact address. Once the police got Rahul’s address, a team went and nabbed him.
“During interrogation, Rahul said that he holds a bachelor’s degree in mining engineering from Banaras Hindu University and has been working with SAIL in Jharkhand since 2019. He said that his hobby is touring sites in ‘inspection mode’ in his free time,” the DSP said. Rahul allegedly tried to change the website’s coding using AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Deepseek. In the case of RPSC, he employed similar techniques through an AI chatbot, bypassing security measures and cloaking himself through a VPN, but left enough of a trail that he withdrew three applications in December 2025. Since then, officials said, DOIT&C has been filling security gaps.
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“After spending many years in Jharkhand, Mr. Rahul was thinking of getting married and settling down in Rajasthan,” the DSP said, adding, “He was mistaken in thinking that he would get the first position after the first merit candidate was eliminated.”
Rahul will be remanded in police custody till June 25 and his devices including mobile phone and laptop will be seized and analyzed by the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) team. The vacancy was eventually secured by Ashish Meena, the first candidate whose application was withdrawn by Rahul.
