INDORE: Unable to challenge the might of Google with his potent search engine tezguru.com in the want of funds in 2009, a teenaged techno genius Shivendu Madhav turned into an alleged cyber criminal five years later.

The 22-year-old techno whizkid from Siwan district of Bihar, Shivendu was arrested by the UP STF on Wednesday in Lucknow, for allegedly being the tech brain of a Varanasi-based racket of youths, who had allegedly created the fake portal of the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB-Bhopal).

The racket headed by Varanasi-based youth Vipin Pathak had subsequently duped large number of job aspirants nationwide in the name of railway jobs, spanning from track men to ticket collector.

According to UP STF sources, the tech sensation has revealed during primary grilling about having created the Google like search engine tezguru.com, which even won accolades from former president Dr APJ Abdul Kalam in 2009 at a techno exhibition in Bihar.

But subsequent efforts by Shivendu and his father in Bihar, to garner funds for making the search engine commercially afflloat turned futile, ultimately prompting the teenager to join forces with Varanasi based Vipin Pathak and plunge into cyber crime in coming years, UP STF sources added.

According to additional SP (UP STF) Dr Triveni Singh, the arrested high school pass Shivendu will be produced before a Lucknow court later on Thursday. A team from MP police cyber cell from Bhopal too has arrived at Lucknow for quizzing the youth in the fake RRB site case.

Presently Varanasi-based, Shivendu had created a web portal, www.rrbbpl.org, which appeared identical to RRB-Bhopal’s official website, www.rrbbpl.nic.in. The young fraudsters had not only developed the fake RRB-Bhopal website, but also gave hypertext links to RRB's official website http://www.rrbbpl.nic.in/so that anybody logging on to the fake site and clicking on a link was taken to the official site, adding credibility to the fraudsters' claims.

Using the fake portal, the fraudsters invited applications for over 11,000 posts in RRB, including ticket collectors, trackmen, helpers and peons and got job aspirants registered to the site via processing fees of Rs 300 and Rs 500.

Shivendu and his aides had got the domain www.rrbbpl.org hosted through a Canadian web hosting server without providing his e-mail and other details. Shivendu had made the payment for the domain hosting through his debit card. The resultant fake RRB portal was subsequently advertised on major examination info related websites and Google to attract job seekers in the trap.

“We came to know about Shivendu through a Mumbai-based internet payment gateway which was being used by him and aides and subsequently located the racket to be based in Varanasi. Subsequent investigations led us to Shivendu on Wednesday in Lucknow and he was arrested," The ASP said.

The techno genius whose technical blog portal www.technozeast.com was acquired by an Indian-origin professor of University of Texas, US, for Rs 4.5 lakh some months ago, had earned several lakh rupees through the fake RRB portal, which he was planning to invest in 3 NGOs registered in Varanasi and Azamgarh districts of East UP.

“To ensure that duped job aspirants get their money back, Rs 13 lakh sum earned by fraudsters has been blocked with the internet payment gateway being used by them and the money will soon be reimbursed to job aspirants,” the ASP maintained.

Hailing from Jaijor village of Siwan, Shivendu also developed an advertising portal www.cozli.com and his success story was prominently published in premier technology magazine Digit a few years ago.