Five people arrested for running fake call centre

Five people, including a woman, were arrested for allegedly running an illegal call centre and duping citizens of foreign countries by impersonating themselves as representatives of a tech support company in south Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, the police said on Friday.

The owner of the call centre, Pritpal Singh (35), and his associates Mayank (26), Chandan Gupta (24), Subham Kumar (22), and HR head Kinkini Das (35) were operating from the third floor of a building in Panchsheel Vihar, they said.

Based on a tip off, the police conducted a raid at the illegal call centre on Thursday and arrested the accused. They were allegedly targeting foreign citizens, mainly from the USA, on the pretext of giving them tech support saying their systems were under a cyber threat, the police said.

High-end software

Subham and Chandan were junior callers while Mayank was a senior caller. They had been working here for the last seven months and had been calling up customers using high-end technical software “X-lite/ Eye Beam” through cloud servers.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (South) Atul Kumar Thakur said, “The accused approached USA-based customers using “X-lite/ Eye Beam” and duped them on the pretext of providing them tech support if they paid a fee of US $100 to US $400. They asked the customer to provide the amount through various payments methods or payment wallets.”

“They were taking wrongful gain as they would first send a pop-up message or bug to the customer after obtaining their data from cloud servers, then say that their system has been attacked by a cyber threat and later ask them to obtain support from them to technically eradicate the pop-up bug or cyber threat from their systems,” he said.

The police claimed to have recovered 13 computer systems with two pen drives and two note books from the call centre.