The Cyber Crime Branch of Gurugram Police busted yet another online fraud case and arrested six people involved in the case on Friday.
Among the six people arrested, five are women. The accused have been identified as Neha, Kamla, Mamta, Pooja, Poonam and Amit.
The modus operandi of the scam involved the accused calling unsuspecting people through different phones numbers and asking them information about their credit cards on the pretext of updating it.
After getting the information, the accused would exploit the victim's credit card to conduct online transactions.
Over a period of one year, more than 100 people were duped by the accused. Gurugram Police began an investigation in the matter after receiving an official complaint from one of the victims, Pankaj Kumar.
In his complaint, Kumar had stated that he was duped of Rs. 45,000 by the accused, who would call him from different numbers posing as bank employees and ask him for his credit card details in order to upgrade it. The six have been charged under sections of 419 and 420 of the IPC and under Section 66 of the IT Act.
Amit was the mastermind of the racket and had recruited five female accomplices at his call centre in Delhi's Dwarka area. From this office, the women would call random people and try to dupe them.
All the five women hail from Delhi and are undergraduates. The women were complicit in the scam in order to make a quick buck. It is to be noted that this is not the first time that Amit has been charged for a cyber crime.
Though the scale of his last criminal pursuit was not massive, Amit had previously been arrested for cyber crime in Pune where he also served a jail term. This, however, did not deter him from executing another scam, this time in the National Capital Region. "This case is another reminder of how people need to be careful about the new trends in cyber crime. As there are educated people who are involved in such crimes, most of the victims get trapped and share vital information with the callers," said a senior police official of the Gurugram Police Cyber Crime Branch.
Cyber crimes, involving credit card and debit cards, are on the rise in Gurugram's Cyber City area. In 2016, there were 1,343 cases of cyber crime, involving credit and debit cards, registered with the Gurugram Police Cyber Crime Branch.