Kolkata: The Kolkata Police busted two fake call centres on Tuesday and Wednesday in Behala and Lake areas from where foreign citizens were being duped on the pretext of fixing technical glitches related to their bank account operations.
Seven persons were arrested from the said call centre and 13 high end mobile phones and three laptops were seized.
On Tuesday, acting on a tip off, cops of the Detective Department conducted a raid at a flat on Roy Bahadur Road in Behala and found that seven persons were making calls using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to US citizens. The accused persons impersonating employees of Paypal were claiming that there were some wrong transactions made on their crypto wallet and to dissolve the issues, the fraudsters used to take control over their bank accounts by remote access software. After gaining access to the US citizens’ computers, they obtained bank account related information which were used to siphon off the money.
On Wednesday, cops from the Detective Department conducted a raid at another call centre in Selimpur area under jurisdiction of Lake Police Station from where Australian citizens were being duped in a similar manner.
The accused persons here used to impersonate employees of Amazon, Visa, Mastercard etc. and used to inform the innocent people that their computer is getting affected or their bank accounts are getting tampered. If any person used to reply and fall for the trap, the fraudsters used to ask for money as a charge for providing services.
If any person agreed to pay, the accused persons would ask the victims for their bank account details.
After obtaining the details, the fraudsters used to siphon off money using gift cards and other similar methods. From this call centre, police arrested nine persons and seized 10 hard drives, 10 headphones with speakers, one mobile phone and one internet router.