Kolkata: Seven persons have been arrested by the Cyber Crime Cell of Kolkata Police for allegedly cheating American citizens by promising technical support online. The accused persons have been remanded to police custody till February 11.
According to police, late on Tuesday night a police team from Beniapukur police station conducted a raid at the Ground Floor of premises no. 5, Nasiruddin Road, where an illegal call centre was being operated.
Since the past few days, police were getting information about a suspicious call centre there. During investigation, cops found that the call centre was set up there to dupe citizens of USA by promising to provide technical support.
The telecallers used to call the USA citizens randomly through Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), to hide their identities. During the raid police seized four laptops, several ATM-cum-debit cards and 11 mobile phones.
Sources informed that the accused persons used to identify themselves as engineers of Microsoft Corporation. They used to tell the victims that their computers had some problem and may crash at any moment.
After convincing them, the accused persons used to take over the control of the computers using remote access software and installed malwares. As soon as the malwares were installed, the computers got locked. The accused persons then used to demand money to unlock the computers.
Earlier during December last year, state Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had busted five call centres which were running illegally and were accused of duping a huge number of people in UK, USA, Australia, Canada and India.
The information about the locations of the call centres was provided by Microsoft, along with a letter of complaint on Tuesday. Before that, Kolkata Police had busted two call centres in the city based on a complaint by the lawyer of Microsoft Corporation in India, identified as Bhupinder Singh Bindra.
Following the raid it came to light that the fraudsters had duped thousands of citizens in UK. It may be mentioned that several fake call centres, which were being operated in the same manner, had been busted by Bidhannagar Police in the past three years.