3 held for duping 600 US citizens

GURUGRAM: The chief minister’s flying squad on late Friday night raided a fake call centre, which had been operating out of a building in Udyog Vihar Phase-2 for the past four months. Three persons were arrested, including the call centre owner.

Inderjeet Yadav, deputy superintendent of police, crime investigation department (CID), said that on Friday night, they received a tip-off that a fake call centre is operational and that the owner was present at the spot. “When the team reached the building and asked the manager to explain the work, he got frightened and tried to mislead us,” he said.

Yadav said the executives used to collect information from US citizens, such as names, mobile numbers, e-mails and later sent them a voice mail. They trapped them after offering them a grant by the US government. “They used to ask victims to purchase Google cards, and then redeemed 100 to 500 dollars from their cards. Through this, they managed to dupe more than ₹50 lakh from over 600 people in the last four months,” he said.

The Flying Squad has busted eight such call centres over the last six months and has also carried out a mapping of the areas from where illegal call centres have been found to be operating across the city.

A case under sections 420, 467, 468, 471 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sections 43, 66D and 75 of the IT Act was registered at Cyber Crime police station in wee hours of Saturday.

Harish Budhiraja, inspector, chief minister’s Flying Squad, said,“The executives used to make calls and inform the US citizens that the government was offering grant. They used to print a coloured forged cheque to show them the amount sanctioned and used to charge money from them. They used to target two kind of customers — first those who were keen on taking the grant and second who had a low credit score,” he said.

The suspects were identified as Sarjeet Kumar (21) of Jhunjunu in Rajathan, who is the owner of the call centre, Kapil Dev (32) of Ahmedabad, and Bhudev Lohar (27) of Dungarpur in Rajasthan. The suspects, during questioning, revealed that they had duped more than 600 US citizens so far. The police said the suspects were produced before the local court on Saturday and taken in one-day remand.