NEW DELHI: Police have arrested 37 people and busted three fake call centres that were duping foreign nationals by posing as law enforcement officials and threatening to freeze their bank accounts. The accused also pretended to be technical support staff from Amazon and Apple while conning foreigners.
While two call centres were being run from Janakpuri, one operated from Bindapur. Police learnt about the scam and conducted a raid, and took into custody 37 persons, including managers, supervisors and operators. Nine of them were working at the Bindapur call centre and 28 at the Janakpuri centres. A total of 56 desktops and 41 phones were seized from the three locations, police said.
Anyesh Roy, DCP (Cyber Cell), disclosed that the victims of the scam being operated from the Bindapur call centre were people residing in foreign countries. During interrogation by the cops, the accused admitted to conning people of over Rs 10 crore. “They used to call people posing as officials of law enforcement agencies,” Roy said. “On the basis of their Social Security Number, they would threaten the victims with freezing their bank accounts on the ground that these accounts were found indulging in transactions with drug cartels. Once the targets were convinced their accounts were being fraudulently used, the accused asked them to either face legal action or buy Bitcoins or Google gift cards and transfer the money into their account.”
The DCP said that the call centres operating from Janakpuri also targeted foreign nationals while pretending to be the technical support staff from Apple or Amazon. “They would tell the customers that their device had been compromised or had been used to make some unauthorised purchases. Then on the pretext of helping them, the scammers would take down their account details and siphon money from the accounts,” revealed Roy. “The accused confessed they had duped people to the tune of Rs 5 crore.”
Police have also found that each caller was paid Rs 25,000-30,000 per month as salary, while the team leaders and closers got a monthly sum of Rs 60,000-75,000. The manager received around Rs 1 lakh a month. In addition to this, all employees were paid incentives. For every US dollar they managed to scam, the caller got Rs 2 and the team leader or the closer Rs 4 as incentive.