Eight persons, including the owner of a call centre, have been arrested for allegedly duping residents of Australia and the UK by posing as representatives of a software major.
A team from the cyber crime police station in Salt Lake raided the call centre that was operating from a rented office in Astra Towers in New Town’s Action Area II early on Wednesday, a senior officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate said.
According to the officer, the call centre was operating under the name of Mono Botics (OPC) Technology Pvt Ltd.
“Its owner, Sheikh Yasir Uddin, 34, was among the eight persons arrested,” said an officer.
“We raided the office while they were placing calls to the UK and Australia. They used to pose as members of the tech-support team of Microsoft and would induce people to click on a link through their website that would help them gain access to the victims’ phones or laptops,” said the officer.
A senior officer said once fraudsters got access to a device, they asked its owner to pay a small amount online to debug the device or counter a viral attack.
“The fraudsters would make note of the banking details the victim would enter while making the transaction and later use them to transfer huge sums of money without the victim’s knowledge,” said the officer.
The police have over the past few months come to
know of several call centres, operating from Sector V and New Town, that were involved in duping people abroad.
The police said that in the majority of the cases they found that the accused who ran the centres felt the cops would not be able to catch them as their victims
were thousands of kilometres away.
