Three call centres raided for cheating US loan defaulters

MUMBAI: Three call centres in Mira Road were raided late on Tuesday and 772 employees were arrested after a probe by the Thane crime branch and Thane rural police

MUMBAI: Three call centres in Mira Road were raided late on Tuesday and 772 employees were arrested after a probe by the Thane crime branch and Thane rural police showed the centres were a front for cheating loan defaulters in the United States.

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Two of the companies have been identified as Universal Outsourcing Services and Hari Om IT park. Police sources said the call centres’ employees would pose as US’ Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officials.

Their target was loan defaulters, who are obliged to cooperate with revenue officials.

The defaulters would be asked for their bank details, which the callers used to hack into accounts to cheat them of money.

“More than 120 women were arrested. A majority of the employees are 20-30 years old,” said Nitin Thackeray, senior police inspector, Thane crime branch unit -1.

SP Dr Mahesh Patil said the call centres were under the radar after similar ones were recently raided in Ahmedabad. The probe found the Ahmedabad centres to be the origin of the scam.

The cheats used a special software to mask the number they were calling from. The software ensured the receiver saw a US number on their phones, Patil said. The employees were trained to speak in American accents, the police said.

The police are probing the role of agents based in the US, who earned a 30% commission for every trap, while the Mira Road agent got a 70% commission.

A victim was targeted by two callers and every caller had a daily target. The job was advertised through stickers in local trains that offered an attractive pay to lure unemployed youth.

While the police are questioning the employees of the three centres, a probe is on to find what they suspect is a gang — suspected to be based in Ahmedabad

“The raid was called off after 24 hours. The accused will be soon produced in court,” said Ashutosh Dumbare, JCP, Thane. LUCKNOW: An American team will visit India next month to probe cyber frauds, originating from the country, which have defrauded thousands of US citizens.

Tech frauds from Uttar Pradesh have been duping US citizens by ‘offering’ them technical support for removing virus or other malware from their computer systems for a price. They charge anything between $50 and $100. Shockingly, nearly 50,000 American nationals were duped this way by fraudsters operating from UP and other parts of India in 2015 alone.

These starting revelations were made after the UP special task force (STF) arrested six techies from Sector 63 of Noida on September 30 and unearthed a call centre run by them allegedly to operate their fraudulent activities. “The gang targeted Indian customers by offering them insurance bonus of private firms during the day time while at night they duped US citizens by offering them online technical support service,” said UP STF additional superintendent of police (ASP), Triveni Singh. A team from the US will visit India in November to probe the case, Singh said.

Bharat Bhaskar, IIM-Lucknow professor and expert in informational technology and systems, said the US is a favourite hunting ground for such tech support fraudsters as it has a bigger number of non-technical computer users who easily fall into the fraudsters’ trap. He said the fraudsters mostly target US nationals as they paid in dollars, the value of which is much higher than the rupee, adding that the fraudsters also had links with an international gang based in the US.