3 held for running racket to dupe NRIs

Two Delhi University graduates and an agent for an international money transfer company have been arrested for allegedly running a racket wherein they duped NRIs residing in the UK, Delhi Police today said.
The three accused have been identified as Pawan Kumar (24), Gaurav Pingolia (31) and Aman Chhabra (24), Additional DCP (EOW) Anyesh Roy said.
All of them are residents of Delhi and have worked in call centres before, added Roy.
The trio had allegedly set up a call centre of their own and would shortlist targets using a popular job portal. They would cheat their victims by misusing the channel of the international money transfer company for which Kumar worked as a licensed agent.

The accused allegedly used a spoof-caller application to convince their targets that they were officials of some immigration department or border agency, said a senior official.
One Amritabh Roy from the UK informed the Economic Offences Wing of Delhi Police via e-mail that his wife had received a call on August 27 from a number which supposedly belonged to the United Kingdom Border Agency.

"They intimidated her by saying that she had not fulfilled the immigration formalities in India while leaving for the UK and that that was a criminal offence. They persuaded her to pay a penalty of 1,477 pounds and kept her busy on the phone for almost four hours until she completed the money transfer," the official added.

Police kept a close watch at one of the branches of the money transfer company in west Delhi's Tilak Nagar area and the accused trio were tracked down soon after.
"During sustained interrogation, the trio disclosed that they used a software for making fake calls imitating actual contact numbers. They chose their targets using job portal naukri.Com and then called them (victims) up by apparently using the genuine phone number of several authorities," said the senior official.
"Once the target fell into their trap, they used to ask them to transfer money via the money transfer network. Then they used to extract the particular transfer code from the victims and withdraw the money from a Delhi-based branch of the money transfer agency," said the official.

The accused have been booked under Section 420 (cheating) of IPC and further investigation is underway, the official added.