17 held for duping US, Canada citizens on pretext of providing technical support

The chief minister’s flying squad and Gurugram Police in a joint operation busted an illegal call centre in Udyog Vihar Phase 4 in the wee hours, and arrested 17 employees for allegedly duping the citizens of the United States and Canada on the pretext of providing technical support, said the officials on Thursday

The chief minister’s flying squad and Gurugram Police in a joint operation busted an illegal call centre in Udyog Vihar Phase 4 in the wee hours, and arrested 17 employees for allegedly duping the citizens of the United States and Canada on the pretext of providing technical support, said the officials on Thursday.

17 held for duping US, Canada citizens on pretext of providing technical support

A search was conducted for several hours on Thursday morning, said the police, adding that at least 43 women were among the 149 employees who were let off after an interrogation, during which their statements were also recorded.

According to the police, the call centre has been operational for the past four months. Employees of the call centre, posing as Microsoft employees, allegedly used to send emails to the citizens of the US and Canada with fake pop-up error messages, saying that “a malware infected their computer systems and if not rectified immediately, their personal and financial data could be compromised”.

The employees used to assure the victims that they would fix the virus, and asked them to install an UltraViewer application to provide them temporary security. Then they used to share access to the screen of the victims’ computer systems, and process it on the command box for a system scan. The suspects then used to visit porn sites including child pornography sites, and collect financial information after getting an access of the victims’ computers to www.pornhub.net. Debit and credit card details were used on these websites to make illegal purchases.

Inderjeet Yadav, deputy superintendent of police (crime investigation department), said they received a tip on Wednesday that an illegal call centre was being operated on three floors of a commercial building in Udyog Vihar Phase 4. “The main suspects had registered a fake company, and hired over 200 employees to run the duping business. They set up the illegal call centre four months ago, and have duped nearly 500 people so far. They duped people by posing as Microsoft employees,” Yadav said.

Yadav also said they had conducted an internal investigation and their teams raided the office on Wednesday late night. “We will get the recovered hard disks scanned, along with their systems, to know the exact number of people who have been targeted since the call centre began functioning,” he said.

Rajiv Yadav, assistant commissioner of police, said that the employees of the call centre used to send pop-up messages to lock the users’ browser, and send warnings such as “malicious malware detected” or “personal information is not safe”. The victims immediately contact the helpline number mentioned on the screen, and the suspects would use aliases, and claimed to be IT experts from prominent companies like Microsoft. The user would be asked to install a bogus paid application for a fee ranging between $500 and $2,000. The fee was taken in the form of gift cards from iTunes or Amazon,” said Yadav, adding that the “illegal call centre was open when the police raided the building.

The employees were busy making phone calls, said the police, adding that the employees were asked to continue taking inbound calls during the raid, and the police recorded videos of more than 50 calls to establish the fraud.

During interrogation, all the employees allegedly revealed that they duped around 500 citizens of the US and Canada in the past four months, and the unidentified owners did not have a company registration certificate or DoT licence. The employees, who had undergone a 10-day voice and accent training, were given a script to read out to the victims.

The police said that a case was registered under Indian Penal Code(IPC) sections 420 (cheating), 120B (conspiracy), and sections 66D and 75 of the Information Technology (IT) Act at the Cyber Police Station and the Udyog Vihar police station on Thursday.

According to the police, all the arrested suspects are residents of Delhi and Gujarat. The police have also recovered six laptops, three desktops, 18 cellphones, one pen drive of 64GB, ₹22 lakh, and pages of scripts allegedly used by the call centre employees to make calls from the illegal call centre.