‘Staff of 4 Mira Road call centres posed as US treasury officials’

MUMBAI: Employees at the four call centres on Mira Road, which were raided by the Thane police crime branch on Saturday in connection with the investigation into

MUMBAI: Employees at the four call centres on Mira Road, which were raided by the Thane police crime branch on Saturday in connection with the investigation into the multi-million dollar call centre scam, would masquerade as officials from the United States Department of the Treasury to coerce their potential victims to make a payment, sources said.

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Unlike the employees at the call centres at Delta building on Mira Road(raided on Tuesday) who would masquerade as IRS officials, the employees at the freshly-raided call centres posed as officials from the United States Department of the Treasury. “The scripts used by callers here is almost similar to those used at the earlier call centres. The only difference is the US treasury department and not IRS was used as the cover,” said sources, adding, “the similarities made us suspect that these call centres were franchises of a parent body.”

Earlier on Tuesday, seven such call centres had been raided and over 700 people were rounded up after the police were tipped off about the extortion syndicate operating there under the garb of BPOs. The employees at these call centres targetted US citizen by masquerading as officials from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the US Federal government. Of those, 72 have been arrested while the rest were released conditionally against notices under the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) to explain why action should not be initiated against them for the crime.

Meanwhile, an officer privy to the investigation told HT that at least 150 employees and officials (including floor managers) at these four call centres have been identified. “These four call centres closed down immediately after Tuesday’s crackdown. In fact, hard discs of several computers were found removed when we conducted searches on Saturday night. However, from the recovered documents and the seating arrangements (at computer terminals) we suspect a total of over 150 people worked there,” said the official, adding, “they have been identified and would be put under arrest soon.”

The existence of the four call centres had been obtained from the interrogation of the accused arrested . However, promoters of these call centres are yet to be identified. “We will know their identities once we arrest the employees,” said the official.

Sources in the Thane crime branch said the four centres are suspected to have made tens of crores of rupees in the past one year. Meanwhile, sources said crime branch teams are now in Ahmedabad, where a key player, Shaggy alias Sagir Thakkar, is holed up. The teams have raided five call centres at Pinnacle Park, but nothing was found. Thakkar is one of the five important operators of the syndicate who went underground after Tuesday’s raid, sources said.