Ajmer: A mining engineer from Rajasthan has landed in the police net for using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to hack into the Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC) portal and ‘delete’ his competition in a government recruitment, quite literally.

Rahul Kumar Meena (27), has been accused of removing the names of three competitors from the provisional list of Assistant Mining Engineer examination, 2024, in order to improve his chances, the Ajmer Police said.

A complaint was received from RPSC deputy director and analyst-programmer Raghuveer Gurjar regarding tampering with the RPSC recruitment portal in the 2024 exam, Shamsher Khan, DSP, Cyber police station, Ajmer, said.

There were 78 candidates in the provisional list for 24 vacancies that was issued in July 2025, officials said. The 24 vacancies included one vacancy under the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category. Here, six ST candidates had made it to the provisional list against that one vacancy.

In an attempt to improve his chances, Rahul Meena, who was second on this ST list, hacked into the system using AI and withdrew the application of Ashish Meena, the first candidate just above him in the merit list. However, worried about raising suspicion, he withdrew two more names on the list, the 4th and 6th candidates, as reported by The Indian Express.

All three candidates received SMS messages that their application has been withdrawn as per their request, Khan said.

“One of them, Ravi, then approached RPSC questioning how his application had been withdrawn when he did not do so, and RSCP subsequently informed the Department of Information Technology and Communication (DoIT&C), which handles the RPSC recruitment portal,” the DSP said.

The option to withdraw the applications was closed at the time they were withdrawn, officials said. An investigation revealed that the same Single Sign-On (SSO) ID was employed to withdraw all three applications; SSO is a unique digital identity issued by the Rajasthan government to every registered citizen, business, and government employee.

This particular SSO ID, allegedly a fake, was created in the name of one Rahul Sinha. Investigators found that the same IP address was used by applicant Rahul Meena to create his login credentials as well.

The IP address to be from the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) compound in Jharkhand further investigation revealed.

“During investigation we found that Rahul Meena had been working in SAIL, Jharkhand, since 2019; this was the same place from where the applications were withdrawn,” Khan said.

Investigators went on search of him in Dausa one it was confirmed that Rahul is the person they’ve been looking for. A police constable then called up his brother pretending to be from a courier service, telling him that the courier will be returned unless Rahul’s exact address is shared. Once the police had Rahul’s address, a team went and caught him.

“During questioning, Rahul said that he has completed his BTech in Mining Engineering from Banaras Hindu University and has been working with SAIL in Jharkhand since 2019. He said that in his free time, he had a hobby of crawling sites on ‘inspection mode’,” the DSP said.

The engineer allegedly employed AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Grok, Deepseek, etc to try and change the coding of websites. For RPSC too, he employed a similar method through AI chatbots to bypass the security measures and mask himself through VPN – but left behind enough trails – while withdrawing the three applications in December 2025; DOIT&C has since plugged the security gaps, officials say.

“Rahul was looking to get married and settle in Rajasthan after spending so many years in Jharkhand,” Khan said, “He was mistaken to think that he would come up to the first position after the first merit candidate was removed.”

Rahul has been sent to police custody till June 25 and his devices, including mobile and laptops, have been seized and will be analysed by the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) team. As for the vacancy, it was eventually secured by the number one candidate whose application was withdrawn by Rahul: Ashish Meena.