Gurugram hotel raid: Police appoint cyber expert to retrieve data

Four employees of the business process outsourcing (BPO) firm and its director, along with the hotel’s director of rooms and the general manager, were arrested late on Friday night. Several others were booked after the police raided the hotel.

Three days after the police raided a luxury hotel in Udyog Vihar for allegedly allowing a call-centre company to run its operations from its premises, a cyber expert was appointed to retrieve data from the devices seized from the rooms, said police officials privy to the investigation on Tuesday.

Gurugram police raided a luxury hotel and arrested employees of a BPO for allegedly running a call centre from the hotel’s rooms during lockdown at Radisson Hotel Udyog Vihar Phase III, near Sirohi toll plaza, in Gurugram, on Saturday, April 18, 2020. (Yogendra Kumar / HT Photo)

Karan Goel, assistant commissioner of police(ACP), DLF, said, “A Delhi-based cyber expert has been appointed and is scanning the data in the nine devices that were seized from the rooms of Radisson hotel. He is also scanning all the five mobile phones seized to check if the company was involved in any possible scams. We are yet to confirm whether the company was involved in any kind of illegal activity,” he said.

Goel said a letter was sent to the department of telecommunications (DoT) on Tuesday, asking for the cancellation of the licence of the company, Saburi TLC World Wide Service Pvt Ltd, which originally operated from Sohna Road. “They had not taken permission to operate from a different location or, for that matter, a hotel. This is illegal,” he said.

Four employees of the business process outsourcing (BPO) firm and its director, along with the hotel’s director of rooms and the general manager, were arrested late on Friday night. Several others were booked after the police raided the hotel. The firm has an office in Spaze IT building on Sohna Road, but shut it down after the lockdown was announced. It had booked 35 rooms in the Radisson hotel and had shifted their operations to the hotel, said the police.

Goel said they have retrieved a few emails exchanged between the hotel and the company. “Despite knowing that the company was planning to run operations illegally, the hotel allowed them to operate from the rooms and did not inform the authorities,” he said.

The hotel had provided LAN cables to the rooms for the workstations of the employees and their laptops, said the police. The police had arrested seven people on Saturday including two senior executives of the hotel for allowing the call-centre company to run its call centre from the hotel despite the ongoing nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19).

The police team raided the hotel in the early hours of Saturday following a tip-off. At that time, over 20 employees were found working in the rooms. The company director could not provide any licence to run the call centre from the hotel, the police said.

Also, two women executive of the call centre recorded their statements under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPc) before the magistrate in the district and sessions court on late Monday evening and alleged sexual and mental harassment by their seniors, the police said.

The victims alleged that there was no internal complaints committee (ICC) for redressal of complaints of the employees despite being a multinational company.

Rakesh Sharma, executive director of Radisson hotel said that they had shut down the Wi-Fi connection provided to the BPO employees in all 35 rooms. “They do not have access to the internet; all the LAN connections have been disabled. On Tuesday, they have checked out of 15 rooms and rest will check out on Wednesday. The people living in the hotel now are placed under quarantine,” he said. Despite repeated calls and messages to Anuj Jain, director of Saburi TLC World Wide Service Pvt Ltd , he did not respond.