Seven arrested for running a fake call centre

Seven persons were arrested by the Sector 39 police on Thursday night for allegedly running a fake call centre in Sector 105 and duping Americans on the pretext

Seven persons were arrested by the Sector 39 police on Thursday night for allegedly running a fake call centre in Sector 105 and duping Americans on the pretext of helping them with security issues.

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The police received a tip that a fake call centre was being run from a house in Sector 105. Based on that information, they informed an assistant manager with MTNL and raided the premises.

“All of them were nabbed from the spot. They had rented the house and were staying together. Even though they said that the operation had been going on for only three months, we suspect that it is much older,” Shailesh Tomar, station house officer, Sector 39 police station, said.

The police said that the suspects would obtain the victims’ contact information through online portals and would use VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) technology to make calls over the Internet. They would tell the victims that their social security numbers had been used in crimes like drugs trafficking, money laundering or vehicle thefts. The suspects would pretend to be from law enforcement agencies and ask their victims to pay a fine and also take their account or card information.

He said that the arrested men are in their early twenties, graduates and speak English well. Six of them are from Mumbai while one is from Gujarat.

The suspects were booked under sections 420 (cheating), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and 188 (Disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and relevant sections of the IT Act and Indian Telegraph Act, 1855.

The police recovered 25 desktops, 23 CPUs, keyboards, mouse, headphones, WiFi routers, cables, Aadhaar cards, passports, passbooks, motorcycles and an employee identity card of a bank in Kuwait.