20 held for running fake call center in Gurugram Sector 33

Gurgaon: Twenty suspects were arrested from a fake call center functioning from a housing society in Sector-33 that was being used to cheat people in foreign countries, police said on Saturday.

Investigators said that the raid at the call center was carried out late on Friday night and continued till the early hours of Saturday.

The arrested suspects have been identified as Ashish Ojha of Darjeeling, Minlun, Amor Abonmoi, Laboi Haokip, Athihari Lohri and Min Baiti of Manipur, Widan Wang, Wikhombou Chwang, Nam Chumbo, Maobe Sangtam and Achele Kewejo of Nagaland, K Lalbiczuali of Mizoram, Shriya Gondotra of Udhampur and Palak Raj of Ramban in Jammu and Kashmir, Manish Kumar from Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, Ramesh Gurung, Vinod Sharma and Shiv Bahadur of Nepal, Monu Kumar from Tilak Nagar, Delhi and Mahendra Bajrang Singh of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

This is the ninth call center busted in the city this year.

Priyanshu Dewan, assistant commissioner of police (cybercrime), said that a tip-off was received about the center following which the raid was carried out. “Mahendra Bajrang Singh was the center manager who was running it since May. He was paying salaries and incentives to the callers,” he said.

Dewan said that the suspects used to send pop-up messages via various vendors especially to western countries alerting the user about a malfunction in their computer or laptop due to hacking or malware.

“If any user trusted the pop-up message and contacted the toll-free number on it for technical support, the voice call through the internet was used to land at the center and the suspects posed as technical experts,” he said.

Police said 16 laptops and 25 mobile phones were seized from the possession of the arrested suspects.