Fake call centre duping US citizens busted; 6 arrested in Delhi

Six men were arrested for allegedly duping customers of a US-based IT company by posing as its tech support experts, police said on Wednesday.

They were identified as Abhishek Chhabra (31), Rahul Gupta (24), Pushkar Raj (23), Aditya Dhankar (23), Arpit Chaudhary (23) and Ashish Vaswani (25).

The police said information was received on Monday that a fake call centre running in the Paschim Vihar area was duping US nationals on the pretext of providing technical support.

Following a technical analysis, a raid was conducted and the accused operating the fake call centre were found making calls to unsuspecting people in foreign countries, a senior police officer said.

Main accused Chhabra was running the call centre since last month, the police said.

The accused sent pop-ups on the computers of their unsuspecting victims saying that their system had been compromised and they should call for technical assistance, the police said.

When the victim called the number, it came to the fake call centre. The accused then pretended to be from the company’s technical support assistance team and induced the victims to give remote access of their computers. Later, they would falsely tell the victims that several malicious programs had been found in their system, police officials said.

They would even caution the victims that their banking credentials might have been compromised and immediate remedial steps were needed. The victims would then agree to pay whatever amount the accused asked for to resolve the issue, they said.

On receiving the payment, the accused pretended to clean up the malware, virus etc. from the victims’ system, the police said.

They have cheated people based in the US of more than ₹one crore like this over the last month, police officials added.