Mumbai: The 13 people arrested by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch in connection with a telecalling racket on Wednesday had pen drives containing contact details of thousands of U.S. citizens, investigating officers said on Saturday.
Late on Wednesday, the Crime Branch Unit III conducted simultaneous raids at two call centres in Malad, arresting the accused and seizing equipment used in the racket. The accused would call up U.S. citizens posing as officials of the Internal Revenue Service, the American federal tax agency, and cheat the victims into paying them to “settle their tax irregularities”.
“Following the arrests, we went through the contents of the pen drives we had seized and found that two to three pen drives contained contact details of thousands of U.S. citizens. The accused were using these details to contact their victims on a daily basis,” said a Crime Branch officer.
The police are now interrogating the accused to find the source of these contact details.
“Investigations indicate that the data came from one of the many gangs that sell contact details of unsuspecting people on a regular basis. The arrested accused had some contacts in the U.S. who would help them convert gift cards bought by their victims into cash. We suspect the contact details came from a gang based in the U.S. too. Such data is regularly bought online by criminal elements running phishing scams,” the officer said.
The Mumbai Crime Branch is likely to get in touch with the Thane police to find if there are any links between their case and the seven similar rackets busted by the Thane Crime Branch in October last year at Mira Road, said officers.
The accused have told the police that they had been running the racket for the last four months, and would make lakhs of rupees on a daily basis. The police are currently conducting searches at their residences and going through their bank account details to trace the trail of the ill gotten money.