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MUMBAI: A call centre operating out of a room in a chawl at Jogeshwari (east) was busted on Saturday. This led the police to a few men in their twenties who were making calls to Americans and defrauding them. Four callers and their team leader have been arrested on charges of cheating. Officials of Meghwadi police station are looking for their coach and accomplices.

The police acted on a tipoff and raided the chawl at Prem Nagar. They found Mohsin Sayyed (22), Rameez Shaikh (25), Arbaaz Ansari

(21) and Umar Mir (22) with three laptops, six cellphones and four headphones. The group led the investigators to their team leader, Afshaan Shaikh, a Marol resident, who controlled operations.

Everyday, Afshaan handed over a list containing 80 to 120 names and contact numbers of Americans to his team. For the last two months, the call centre had been operating at night, when it is business hours in America.

The team members are all class XII passouts and some of them have worked at BPOs before. They were separately trained in Marol as to how to talk convincingly to American nationals and dupe them.

The team first sent text messages to their American targets, claiming that they worked with a US company and were disbursing loans. If the target responded that s/he needed a loan, they would ask for the person’s social security number. This number was then entered into an app which provided the accused persons with all financial details of their target. The accused persons would then call back the individual and inform him that his credit score was too low. If he still wanted the loan, he would now be required to pay up a security deposit, they would say.

The individual was then asked to purchase Walmart or Google Pay Gift cards and send the details with a PIN number. This information was relayed to Afshaan who would redeem the gift cards.

The team earned a commission of Rs 20 for every US dollar that Afshaan earned.

“We recovered a laptop and six cellphones from Afshaan. He had formed a WhatsApp group called ‘Global’ and added all his team members to it so that they could exchange information and communicate regularly. The communication was in the form of texts as well as voice calls,” said senior inspector Sudhir Nirgudkar of Meghwadi police station.

More arrests are likely. A holiday court at Bandra sent the five accused to police custody till Thursday.

