Amit Chauhan lived in a rented flat for which he paid Rs 5 lakh/month

GURUGRAM: Around midnight, a black Porsche bearing the number 0001 would screech to a halt at DLF Magnolias. Clad in a designer suit, Amit Chauhan would walk briskly to the lift to go to his flat, for which he paid a rent of Rs 5 lakh a month.

The ostentatious lifestyle of the 30-year-old did not stand out in the affluent neighbourhood that is home to the cream of the corporate world. It, in fact, helped Chauhan blend in, inhabit a spectrum he had dreamt of but taken a shortcut to. He had got there by stealing other people’s money. He was the crook who lived like a CEO.

Chauhan’s lavish lifestyle had begun in January 2019 and he appeared comfortable, cheating people in faraway Britain while running a perfectly legal business — a travel company — in Gurugram , until he received a call from Jim Browning, an ethical hacker from England, last May. A few months later, he again received a call from the UK, this time from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which sought to know the source of his income and asked him if he was running a fake call centre. This Tuesday, six months after the BBC dialed Chauhan’s phone, police came knocking on his doors.

Chauhan and his accomplice, 26-year-old Sumit Kumar, were arrested for orchestrating a scam that might have gone on undetected and preyed on many more unsuspecting UK citizens for a lot longer had the BBC not come out with a documentary on the fake call centre that got Gurugram police’s attention.

The documentary was the result of an investigation by Browning, who used “reverse hacking” to gain access to the systems and CCTV cameras used in the bogus call centre that Chauhan had set up in Udyog Vihar, Gurugram’s biggest office district. So, sitting in his home in the UK, Browning could see youngsters here speaking over the phone in heavily accented English. He contacted BBC, which tried to reach out to Chauhan. The BBC then came out with the documentary on YouTube.

“They would use malware to hack into computers (of British citizens) and lock the screen. They would then call up users and ask for a one-time fee of more than Rs 1 lakh to unlock the screen. The users had little option but to pay the money if they wanted their systems to be up and running again. This continued between January and September 2019,” said ACP Karan Goyal.

Chauhan’s offices in Sonit Tower were searched on Tuesday. Several hard drives, documents of three bank accounts with a total of Rs 3 crore in them and laptops were recovered from the office. Police suspect Chauhan may have several other bank accounts and are trying to trace the money trail.

A dropout from Kurukshetra Institute of Technology and Management (KITM), where he was enrolled in the BTech course, Chauhan had been running a travel agency — Faremart Travels — since 2015. The travel agency was just the front office: the five floors of Sonit Tower in Udyog Vihar, which police say Chauhan entirely owns, were devoted to his call centre, a bunch that mounted malware attacks and then offered the cure for a huge fee. Chauhan had in his employ around 50 youngsters.

Chauhan had, after the BBC call, wound up the call centre, though he continued to live in the Magnolias. Police are now questioning the employees. “The other employees are under our scanner. We have not arrested any of the workers yet but have recorded their statements,” Goyal said, adding they had requested Browning to share his findings.

Delhi-NCR has blipped prominently on the radar of police in different countries as it has emerged as a hotbed of bogus call centres that are run under the garb of legitimate companies. Many of them have targeted people in the US, UK, Canada and Mexico. The modus operandi has ranged from impersonating the local tax authorities to targeted malware attacks.

Analysts say that low rent of office buildings and easy availability of youths with good command over English are the prime reasons for the mushrooming of such bogus call centres. What makes it difficult to trace these gangs is that they keep changing their offices from time to time.

