New Delhi
The Delhi Police’s intelligence fusion and strategic operations (IFSO) unit claimed to have busted a fake call centre in southwest Delhi’s Dwarka that allegedly cheated US citizens by impersonating technical support executives of a multinational technology company. Fourteen people, including three key management staff, were arrested after IFSO raided the call centre on Thursday during a nationwide crackdown against cyber criminals, officials said on Saturday.
A senior police officer said that during the 48-hour anti-cybercrime drive, named “CyHawk 5.0”, IFSO received inputs about a fraudulent call centre operating from Sector 5 in Dwarka.
During the raid, 14 persons were found operating from 13 active laptop workstations. All were arrested and booked for cheating by personation, using forged documents and electronic records as genuine, and criminal conspiracy under sections 318, 319, 340 and 61 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and sections 66C and 66D of the Information Technology Act, the officer said.
“Victims in the US were targeted through fraudulent pop-up alerts on their computer screens falsely claiming their system had been compromised, with toll-free numbers for assistance. Calls generated through overseas vendors were routed to the Dwarka call centre. The callers then impersonated the company’s security experts and induced victims to make payments via gift vouchers and coupons for fake technical support,” the officer added.
The arrested management staff were identified as Pawan Gupta (32), Ved Prakash Gaur (30), and Kushagr Bishnoi (26). The 11 tele-callers arrested were Satya Prakash Shukla (27), Kshitiz Malik (29), Raman Kumar Kalshan (30), Dilip Kumar (31), Mukesh alias Sam (26), Aniket alias Alex (26), Shubham Shivam (28), Upender (26), Ankit Sonkar (31), Saurabh Dixit (27), and Himanshu (27).
“Investigation further revealed the involvement of Jaspreet Singh alias Jassi from Delhi, who allegedly operated and supervised the call centre through Indian and foreign mobile numbers and coordinated daily collections and sales targets. We recovered 13 laptops with accessories, 25 mobile phones, databases of US citizens, and other incriminating digital evidence,” the officer said.
