3 held for running illegal call centres to dupe US-based senior citizens

The Delhi Police has arrested three men for allegedly running illegal call centres here and defrauding senior citizens based in the US on the pretext of providing them with technology support against "malfunctioning" of their computers, officials said on Friday.

The accused, identified as Jatin Lamba, Harshad Madaan and Vikas Gupta, were held in Delhi after police conducted overnight raids, whereas their counterpart Jayant Bhatia was arrested by Canadian Law Enforcement Agency from Toronto and Kulwinder Singh was arrested by the FBI, USA from New Jersey, they said.

Police said Jatin Lamba with his brother Gagan Lamba was running a company from Ganesh Nagar, New Delhi camouflaging as a tech support company and used to run call centres that targeted US citizens.

 

Deputy Commissioner of Police (IFSO, Special Cell) Prashant K Gautam said Gupta has been involved in the scam as calling agent to provide tech support to fix the technical glitch in the computer of the victim.

Madaan, the DCP said, used to mobilize the cheated funds to the account of the alleged company on commission basis as he had arranged bank accounts in a fraudulently-created companies WebMaster and Webleaders in United States to collect the amount from victims in US and then transfer the same through wire to the account of alleged company in Delhi.

According to police, the matter came to light after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) approached the Delhi Police through Interpol Wing of the CBI with details of cyber criminals who had been operating full-fledged call centres from Delhi and adjoining areas to defraud senior citizens of the US on the pretext of providing them tech support against malfunctioning of their computers.

According to the information shared by the US, there are more than 20,000 victims who have fallen prey to such schemes of crime devised and executed by the criminals based in India, causing revenue loss of more than USD 10 million to America between 2012 and 2020, police said.

Explaining the modus operandi, the officer said that in scam of tech support, pop-ups were sent to a large number of targeted senior citizens who are not tech-savvy. They would be alerted to a Microsoft issue or some type of fraudulent activity that must be addressed immediately by calling a designated telephone number on the pop-up advertisement.

"On contacting the designated number, the target was convinced to pay a certain amount for fixing the so-called technical glitch by taking over the control of the computer of victim through voluntarily-shared code of any RDP (Remote Desktop Programme) like AnyDesk, LogMeIn etc.

"Generally, it is fake technical issue in the computer of victim but they are convinced to pay certain sum of amount through cheque, money order or PayPal etc. In some instances, they re-victimise the same person to pay again and again. These types of threat vectors targeting US senior citizens were found to be originated from Canada or India," the DCP said.

"During course of investigation, two laptops and three mobile phones were taken into possession from the accused. Forensic scrutiny of Harshad Madaan's laptop led to the recovery of the statement of commission received by him from M/s PC Support and Care (alleged company) for facilitating the transfer of cheated amount from the victims to the account of PC Support and Care Pvt. Ltd., which was incorporated on August 17, 2012 having its registered address at Ramesh Nagar, Delhi with two directors Jatin Lamba and Gagan Lamba," the officer said.

Police said a company identified as Techspine Technologies Pvt. Ltd. was also found to be incorporated with ROC- Delhi and Haryana by Vikas Gupta with Aditya Gupta as its directors.

"During his interrogation, Vikas Gupta stated that the alleged company was created to run a call centre from Faridabad to cheat the US citizens, but it could not take off and he ended up as a calling agent on behalf of M/s PC Support and Care," Gautam said.

Police said further investigation into the case is underway even as the scrutiny of bank accounts of alleged company has revealed huge transactions from abroad and total amount of credit entries to be Rs 4,36,45,376 during the period from January 12, 2012 to November 6, 2020.