13 arrested for running fake call centre racket

MUMBAI: The Mumbai crime branch on Thursday night busted a major fake call centre racket and arrested 13 suspects, including an engineer, from two different offices in Malad.

Preliminary investigations have found that the suspects would pose as officials of United States (US) treasury department and dupe victims. Rough estimate suggests over 300 people have been duped and the racket runs into crores and exact figure would be found after probing the racket in detail.

Acting on a tip off, the crime branch raided two locations in B2B near a hotel, Kach Pada, Malad (West) and at Aditya Industrial estate at Chincholi Bunder, Malad (West) where the accused had rented the premises and were active for the past four to five months.

The accused in both the raids, use to send messages to US citi- zens posing as treasury department officials with the Internal Revenue Service and used to write that there were differences in taxes they have paid and used to ask them to pay up.

“They use to send 1,000 messages in a day and even if 50 used to respond they would use every trick to dupe them. The content of the message kept changing,” a senior official of crime branch said. They used to talk the victim in American accent using words like attorney, IRS, etc to gain his trust to dupe the victim, he added.

The arrested accused in the first case are: Musir Shaikh (27), Talib Ansari (29), Ajim Shaikh (24), Adil Sayyad (24), Ronald Rodrigues (30), Farhan Shaikh (28), Prashant Kamble (21) and Abhishekh Dubey (29).

And in the second raid police have arrested: Sohel Shaikh (24), Zarar Haidar (24), Sadad sayyad (21), Sabad Shaikh (22), Hemant Gaikwad (23) and Abhishekh Dubey (29). All are residents of Mumbai.