‘50 duped’, say cops a day after illegal Gurugram call centre busted and 38 held

A day after an illegal call centre was busted for allegedly extorting money on the pretext of recovering loans obtained from loan disbursing applications, police on Sunday said at least 50 people were duped by the 38 suspects who were arrested on Saturday.

The police have received several complaints on how the victims, who had taken loans from 35 applications in question, were being blackmailed and extorted money from by sending morphed nude photographs to them and their relatives through WhatsApp.

A case was registered against the arrested suspects under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Information Technology Act at the Cybercrime police station on Friday night, and the Cyber Crime police team is scanning the complaints and investigating if more such call centres are involved in extorting money, said the police.

Preet Pal Sangwan, assistant commissioner of police (crime), said that the suspects would target people who took loans through Chinese applications and defaulted on payments. These applications could be downloaded only through URLs sent to any specific receiver and not on Play Store, said the police.

“After a person downloads one of the applications in question, the suspects get access to their photographs, contacts, and other personal documents saved in their cellphones. They also get access to the users’ emails and passwords,” Sangwan said.

The suspects used to get details of the victims on their mobile phones through WhatsApp. It included their user IDs and passwords created after downloading the applications, which could be only used in English or Chinese language for loans.

The employees of the illegal call centre used to hack the cellphones of the victims and gain access to their personal documents, then morph their photographs, and send those to them and their relatives to extort money, Sangwan added. “Many victims were blackmailed and extorted money from though they had repaid the loans,” he said.

The employees of the illegal call centre were trained to dupe such people, and were given 25% cut from the money being extorted on the pretext of recovering loans.

Police said the main suspects, who are owners of the call centre — Shantanu Kaushik, 35, and Abhinav Vashishtha, 26, residents of Delhi’s Phoont Kalan and Jhajjar’s Kheri Hojdarpur — had been running on the first floor of a building in Udyog Vihar’s Phase I since November 2021. The call centre was raided around 2pm on Friday, and 27 laptops, 44 cellphones, and ₹1.7 lakh were seized from the possession of 38 people arrested from the centre, said the police.

The call centre staff has extorted nearly ₹3.5 crore from a large number of people, and they made phone calls to around 700 people on a daily basis to extort money from them, he added.

Sangwan said that the police are investigating if the owners of these applications were also involved in the crime, and shared the users’ details from China or somebody from India was involved in it.

A police team will take the suspects along with it on several raids at different locations across Delhi-NCR, which are to be conducted on Monday, to find out whether other call centres have also been involved in such crime.