Tech support scam: 16 held after raids at fake call centre
New delhi: Sixteen people have been arrested for duping US citizens through a fake call centre from Industrial Area at Kirti Nagar in West Delhi. Police said they received secret information about international online cheating. It also came to notice that fraudsters are engaged in using illegal techniques, VOIP calls, bypassing the legal International Long Distance (ILD) gateways and thus causing wrongful loss to the government exchequer.
"It was learnt that they are cheating innocent people based abroad (USA) on the false pretext of providing them technical support by pretending to be official tech supporters of Amazon," the official said. A raid was conducted at a call centre and 16 people were arrested.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) Urvija Goel said the tech support scam, one of the criminal schemes, operated from the centres, typically begins with a pre-recorded threatening robocall claiming to be from Amazon and telling the recipient that suspicious transactions have taken place in their Amazon account and then deceitfully persuade them to connect with them for resolving that issue (which in actual doesn't even exist), get their computer, mobile remote access through software like Quick Support, Any Desk.
Later, they induce the victims to make purchases through gift cards (X-Box, Grey) from their Amazon account linked credit, debit cards, claiming it to be a dummy transaction and part of the verification process.
Then they get information regarding their banking credentials and make them transfer the amount to temporary fake Zelle accounts of the accused and finally sending the victims to stores, supermarket near them for purchasing gifts cards and conveying the gift cards numbers to the accused. As the victim gets financially exploited to his maximum and the accused see no more scope of duping him, the call is blocked.
As the numbers used by the alleged are spoofed VOIP numbers, the complainant can neither call back nor those numbers can be traced. The accused persons procure the details of US resident victims using illegal techniques, VOIP calling and caller ID spoofing. The magnitude of the total cheated amount is estimated to be in crores.
Investigators have told Millennium Post that they are usually dependent on tip-offs for raids at such call centres. "These fraudsters work in such a way that they have nothing to do with India. They use those phone numbers which are of other countries and also the account in which they keep their cheated money belongs to foreign countries," one official said, adding that it is very difficult to track the money trail.
Another official said, "They use such modus operandi that they can easily cheat foreigners but the same may not be useful for cheating people in India."
Several such cases have come up in the recent past and one such case is also being probed by the CBI.
