4 am breakfast orders help police bust fake call centre racket

Mumbai: On the night of April 4, police inspector Amar Patil received a bit of mystifying information from a local eatery at Virar’s Rajodi Beach, a picturesque seashore dotted with bungalows. The informant told him that for the past month, they had been getting orders for tea and breakfast for 50 people at the unearthly hour of 4 am. The orders came from a dormitory 10 feet away from Mayur Kutir farmhouse, adjacent to the beach front.

“The information was enough to raise suspicion. Tourists wouldn’t order tea and breakfast at 4 am, and definitely not for close to a month,” said Patil, who started the investigation. Patil and his team first gathered intel from the local internet provider and gas agency and found out that an office had been set up in the dormitory. “We also found that 50-year-old Mayur Patole owned the bungalow and the dormitory, which made us even more suspicious,” he said. “Patole had rented out the same space to Nigerian drug peddlers who were arrested in 2021.” For the next one week, Patil and his team kept a watch on the bungalow and found that a fake call centre was operating out of the dormitory.

At 3 am on April 11, 20 teams of the Arnala police raided the dormitory and arrested 47 employees, including 27 men and 20 women, five supervisors, four team leaders, one coordinator and Patole himself. “As we entered, we saw 50 tables set up and a computer on each table with a landline connection. The work was in progress when we barged in, and we caught several employees in the middle of phone calls,” said Patil. Neither the coordinator nor Patole had any legal papers for the call centre except the rent agreement for six months which was signed by a man from Delhi.

The police searched the premises and found ₹20 lakh in cash, which was being used to pay for food and other amenities. “The call centre had been operating in the farmhouse for the past 25 days. In order to maintain secrecy, the employees were not allowed to go out or talk to anyone outside,” said Suhas Bavche, deputy commissioner of police, Vasai-Virar. Bavche added that most scamsters, knowing the police would close in sooner or later, tended to operate these fake call centres for no more than three to four months in one place and then move to another location.

As the arrested were brought to the police station, the officers realised that except for Patole, all the others were residents of Delhi, Haryana and Gurugram. After questioning them and investigating the fake call centre, they realised that the racket was enormous. “It ran across several countries. These men and women were just the tip of the iceberg,” said Bavche.

So far, the police have found out that the financial support to the call centre was provided by foreign nationals from the UK and US to dupe Australian nationals of millions of dollars. Although only the employees and managers of the call centre have been arrested, the cops have got leads in Delhi and Haryana from where the employees were hired and trained.

The working:

The interrogation of the employees revealed that they were hired through agents in Delhi and Haryana who provide manpower for call centres. The employees were given extensive training in the Australian accent and handed the script in Delhi, where they were given accommodation for the training period of one month. They were promised a salary of ₹20,000 along with accommodation and food.

The men and women were then brought to Virar and housed in Mayur Kutir with instructions to not venture out. The call centre was being run from 3 am to 4 pm. “The employees told us that most of them had completed their higher secondary exams and were unemployed when they approached the agency for work,” said Bachve. “All of them knew they were working for a call centre but claimed that they had no idea it was defrauding people. For most of them, the money was good.”

The farmhouse was rented through a local agent and all the other amenities were also bought on cash. The cable operator and phone connections were done through local contacts.

The employees told the police that they were tasked to answer calls from Australians who called the customer service of Paypal Australia Pty Limited, which provides a financial service whereby monetary transactions can be done through email. “The calls of the customer service were diverted to this fake call centre through computer experts in foreign countries like the UK and USA,” said Bavche.

Once a call was connected, the employee would speak to the Australian citizen and ask them to open their email ID. The employee then pressed the ‘Forgot password’ key on their computers, after which the computer asked them to set a new password with the help of a one-time password, “The employees used to keep the Australian citizen busy over the phone, and ask them for the OTP which they said was for solving their problem,” said Bavche.

Once the OTP was obtained, the employee would copy all the victim’s credentials from their email and paste it in the drafts section of their superior’s email, which used to be open with them. “The credentials were not saved—they were just posted in the drafts section so that there was no footprint left for forensic evidence,” said Bavche. In a day, if an employee answered 100 calls and got the credentials of at least 15, it was enough, according to the employees, who are now in judicial custody.

The investigation:

The police officers said that this first ever case in Maharashtra was just the first layer of the racket. “We have got the name of the Delhi person who signed the rent agreement,” said Bachve. “The computers have been sent for forensic analysis, and we are very close to finding out the names and addresses of the people who hired the employees. We have also found out that foreign nationals are providing the financial support for the entire racket, which is run in several cities in India. Once the agents and others are arrested and the entire racket is unearthed, we will know how deep it runs.”