gurugram

Updated: Mar 04, 2020 23:51 IST

A 30-year-old resident of The Magnolias in DLF 5 was arrested along with an associate on Tuesday for his alleged involvement in running a fake call centre in Udyog Vihar. Through the call centre, the suspect was allegedly duping users in United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK), of millions of dollars and pounds, on the pretext of providing remote technical support.

The police said that at least 40,000 users, based in the UK, US and a few other English-speaking countries, are suspected to have been targeted.

The suspects were identified as Amit Chauhan and Sumit Kumar of Jind. Kumar was an accountant in Chauhan’s office and was involved in managing the funds earned fraudulently, police said. While Chauhan is a dropout from an engineering college of Kurukshetra, Kumar is a BCom dropout from a college in Jind, police said.

The police raided Chauhan’s office in Udyog Vihar Phase 4 on Tuesday afternoon and arrested the two suspects, police commissioner Muhammad Akil said. “The cyber crime police team carried out a raid at his office building after preliminary investigation. When the police team reached the call centre they witnessed executives making calls posing as technical experts from Microsoft. When police asked them to show the documents and licences for running the call centre, Chauhan tried to mislead the police, but later confessed to the crime,” he said.

Chauhan and Kumar were arrested from the office after they allegedly confessed to their involvement in the scam. Later in the day, the police raided Chauhan’s rented apartment in The Magnolias, DLF 5, from where his laptop was recovered, police said, adding that Chauhan was living there with his wife and son for the past two years and allegedly paid a rent of ₹4 lakh a month.

Police said they have recovered enough evidence to establish his involvement in the scam and how the call centre run by him duped victims. “The script used by the telecallers was allegedly found in his laptop,” Akil said.

Police said the data recovered has details of thousands of users, including their email IDs, credit and debit card numbers. “We are verifying all the details. We have assigned the task of sending emails to all victims to Vivek Kundu, station house officer, Cyber Crime police station,” said Akil.

The allegedly fake call centre came to light on Tuesday when assistant commissioner of police (DLF) Karan Goel was surfing the internet and saw a video where a UK national had shared a video describing the entire operations of duping people from a fake call centre in Udyog Vihar.

“A team was formed and the building at Udyog Vihar was identified. When the police team was conducting preliminary investigation, before raiding the building, they were told by Chauhan’s neighbours that he runs a tour and travels company,” he said. However, Goel said, a call centre was being run inside the building named ‘Sonit Tower’ and the telecallers were seen making calls on Tuesday afternoon. The executives were detained and later let go after recording their statements, police said.

Explaining the operations, Goel said the executives in this call centre sent ‘regular pop-ups’ on a user’s computer screen with warning such as ‘malicious malware detected’, ‘personal information is not safe’, ‘your computer has been locked’. “They used to send messages stating that if the problem was not rectified immediately, personal and financial data would be compromised. The panicked user was then forced to call the helpline numbers mentioned in the pop-up messages for ‘technical support’. The suspects pose as technical support experts of big companies, such as Microsoft, and asked to pay a fee through digital wallets to fix their ‘infected’ computer system,” said Goel.

The police said the suspects used to charge the victims exorbitant fee for fixing the ‘problems’, conning them into paying anything between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds for installing allegedly bogus applications in the garb of technical assistance.

“Based on the information we have gathered, Chauhan was running two different call centres—one was for his tour and travel business and other one was the fake call centre. He had registered different companies to dupe people. Chauhan and his associates were causing wrongful loss to many foreign nationals and wrongful gain to themselves by running various companies and call centres,” Goel said.

A case under sections 420 (cheating), 120 B (conspiracy) of Indian Penal Code and Sections 75, 43 and 66D of IT Act was registered at Cyber Crime police station on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the suspects were taken on a day’s police remand after being produced before the court.

“We are taking details of Chauhan’s company’s bank account to get the exact transaction amounts received. We will also write to the embassies concerned regarding this fraud taking place and will apprise them of the issue faced by the people seeking online technical support,” Akil said.

The police on Wednesday contacted Microsoft Corporation (India) Private Limited, as their name has also been used by the suspects for duping victims.

Earlier, in December 2018, 17 FIRs were filed by Microsoft Corporation (India) Private Limited in Gurugram and Noida. The complainant had conducting a detailed internal inquiry against the suspects after receiving numerous complaints from users based in 12 countries, including the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, among others.

“Microsoft has been working with Indian law enforcement agencies to safeguard the interests of the Indian IT industry along with educating and protecting the public against such crimes. Protecting the public and building trust in technology and the internet is a top priority for Microsoft. We will continue to provide assistance to the Gurugram Police and help identify any victim reports received by us against this call centre, once we are formally approached to join the investigation,” said spokesperson of Microsoft.

DLF did not respond to requests for a comment on the matter.