Fake call centre that duped 400 in the US busted, two arrested

The chief minister’s flying squad on Wednesday night busted a call centre and arrested two suspects from Sector 61.

The chief minister’s flying squad on Wednesday night busted a call centre and arrested two suspects from Sector 61.

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The arrested suspects, investigators said, used to allegedly dupe people, especially those in English-speaking countries like the US, under the garb of providing technical support.

Police said the call centre employees used to allegedly send an email to US and UK citizens with fake pop-up error messages stating that a malware had infected their computer systems and if not rectified immediately, their personal and financial data could be compromised.

This year the police have busted 45 such bogus call centres and made 68 arrests.

Inderjeet Yadav, deputy superintendent of police, crime investigation department, said they received a tip-off on Tuesday that an illegal call centre was operating out of the fifth floor of a commercial building in Sector 61. “The suspects had registered a company named MWDN Techtrust Worldwide IT Services Pvt Limited. They had set up the call centre last month and had duped nearly 400 victims so far,” he said.

Yadav 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.

Harish Budhiraja, inspector, chief minister’s flying squad, said that there were six men and two women working as tele-callers at the call centre. They had more than 20 desktops in the office and 10 laptops. After the raid, we asked the employees to continue taking inbound calls and videographed more than 50 calls to establish the fraud. We questioned all the eight employees who allegedly revealed that they had duped around 400 US citizens in the last one month alone. “The pop-ups would repeatedly show up on a user’s computer screen with warnings such as ‘malicious malware detected’, ‘personal information is not safe’, ‘your computer has been locked’. The victims would panic and contact at the helpline number that comes with the pop-up message to get the issue resolved. Instead, they would end up getting duped by them on the pretext of getting technical support,” he said.” he said.

Budhiraja said the owners had no company registration certificate or DoT licence. The employees were given a script to read out and had undergone 10 days voice and accent training before hitting the floor.

A case was registered on Thursday at the Cyber police station under sections 420 (cheating), 120B (conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code(IPC) and sections 66D and 75 of the IT Act, after which two of the owners of the fake call centre were arrested from the spot.