Cops bust fake call centre at Vasant Kunj farmhouse

Eighteen people were arrested from a Vasant Kunj farmhouse which was allegedly being used as a fake call centre to target Americans by threatening to falsely implicate them for downloading child pornography on their computers, said the Delhi Police’s crime branch on Monday

Eighteen people were arrested from a Vasant Kunj farmhouse which was allegedly being used as a fake call centre to target Americans by threatening to falsely implicate them for downloading child pornography on their computers, said the Delhi Police’s crime branch on Monday.

TOPSHOT - A Delhi police barrier blocks a street during a Delhi state-wide weekend curfew imposed by the authorities to curb the spreading of the Covid-19 coronavirus in New Delhi on January 8, 2022. (Photo by Prakash SINGH / AFP) (AFP)

The arrested persons included the alleged owner of the call centre, his partners, and 14 tele-callers who also lived in the same three-storey farmhouse located on Church Road in south Delhi’s Vasant Kunj, said Ravindra Singh Yadav, special commissioner of police (crime branch).

The raid was carried on the intervening night of Friday and Saturday after they received a tip-off about American citizens being cheated on the pretext of providing technical support.

When the police team landed at the farmhouse, they allegedly found 14 tele-callers busy making calls through their laptops, each of which was found to be containing conversation scripts which guided the callers in trapping their victims, said Yadav.

“The tele-callers would first send pop-ups on the computers of Americans saying that their system was hacked, and would offer a toll-free number as tech support. They would threaten them with uploading pornographic content on their systems,” Yadav said.