Another call centre targets Americans; it hacked PCs

Gurgaon: Police on Friday busted a bogus call centre operating from a basement of a building in Sushant Lok-1 and arrested four people.
The call centre was duping foreign nationals in the name of tech-support and had hired youngsters with call centre experience and had trained them to talk to foreign nationals, especially Americans.
The call centre, operating without a licence and permissions, used to send pop-up alerts about system lockdown, urging people to call on toll-free numbers and get their system repaired against a one-time payment.
The fraudsters used to get the payment through gift cards and the gift cards were routed to bank accounts in India through Europe and China. The employees working at the call centre were given fake American names to interact with the potential targets.
This was the second fake call centre busted in the past one week and in the year so far police have busted around seven fake centres operating from Gurgaon. Acting on a tip-off, inspector Jagbir, SHO of Sector 29 police station, conducted raids on the basement of a building located behind Galleria Market in Sushant Lok-1 on Friday. He said, “We found around 28 youngsters, including 23 men and 5 wome with headphones sitting in front of their desktops and talking over the phone in an American accent.”
ACP (DLF) Karan Goyal said the call centre was owned by one Manu Singh, a resident of Bhiwani, with his partners Arun Singh, a resident of Sikahnderpur, Pushpender Singh, a resident of Laxman Vihar and Pankaj Yadav, a resident of DLF Phase-1. All four have been arrested and taken to police custody after being produced in court.
Police said that Manu Singh was earlier into liquor business and got in touch with Arun, Pushpender and Pankaj earlier this year and decided to set up the fake call centre when lockdown was announced. The employees were paid Rs 20,000 and incentives.
A case has been lodged under IPC Sections 420 (cheating), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and Section 66D (cheating by personation by using computer resource) and 75 (committing offence outside India using computer network) of IT Act at Sector 29 police station.
Delhi-NCR has emerged as one of the biggest hubs of fake call centres cheating foreign nationals. Police say availability of call centre eco-system and trained manpower is behind the mushrooming fake call centres.
Besides, a poor rate of conviction and high rate of return is an encouragement. Most of these call centres remain functional for a few months. They either get caught or change their location. The victims are foreigners and they never come here to testify before court and in the absence of testimony, the cases become weak and accused get away easily.