Fake call centre racket in Mohali: 147 bail pleas dismissed

Two weeks after the cyber crime division of the Punjab Police blew the lid off a major call centre racket targeting US residents through fraud calls and arrested 155 employees of two call centres in Sector 74, multiple local courts have dismissed 147 bail pleas.

Counsels for the accused, seeking bail, submitted that they were falsely implicated as there was no victim or complainant in the case. They further added that no recovery was effected from the applicants.

Meanwhile, the state counsel, seeking dismissal of the bail pleas, argued that the allegations against the accused were very serious and thus should not be released. Police informed the court that a detailed conversation sheet was obtained from the accused’s computers in which the accused pretended to be calling from Amazon customer service centre.

“The entire detail has been given in the sheet pertaining to the manner of conversation they had to engage in with the victim and how the IP address was to be obtained by luring them to cancel the order. Once the victim used to click on that link, they were duped of their hard money directly from their bank account,” the public prosecutor argued.

The investigating officer also placed on record the pro forma of fake arrest warrants purportedly issued by US district courts in the name of the victims.

“The pro forma of these arrest warrants has been recovered from the computer system on which the accused were working. Since it was a call centre, multiple computer systems and other hardware were recovered which has been sent for analysis. It will take considerable time to recover the incriminating data against the accused, and if released on bail, they will definitely run away by violating the bail conditions,” the state counsel added.

Considering the arguments, the courts, including the court of judicial magistrate first class Sonali Singh, dismissed the pleas and observed that at the stage when voluminous data was to be analysed by the cyber forensic team to unearth the incriminating data against the accused persons; it would not be just to release the applicant/accused on bail.

As many as 79 desktop computer units, 204 laptops and mobile phones, besides training scripts to lure the customers into paying were recovered from the accused on May 16.

Punjab DGP Gaurav Yadav had revealed that the accused made deceptive calls to US citizens from two call centres, one at plot number F-88 and another at A-One Tower, both in Sector 74, Mohali. According to police, both call centres were being operated by Gujarat-based kingpins.

All accused were booked under Sections 419, 420, 467, 468, 471 and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and Sections 66C and 66D of the Infornation Technology (IT) Act at the state cyber crime cell police station.