Mastering foreign accents, they offered tech support; cheated customers abroad

Police have arrested the winner of Mr Haryana 2018 title and his friend, who owns a call centre, for allegedly duping foreigners into revealing their bank account details on the pretext of offering tech support.

Together, they had mastered multiple foreign accents and duped hundreds of American and European customers of Google, iPhone, Paypal and Facebook, the police said. Four of their associates, who had also allegedly cheated foreigners through the fake call centre they had set up, were also arrested, police said.

The police have identified the winner of Mr Haryana title as Yashwant Singh, a resident of Pitampura. He is an arts graduate from Delhi University, police said. Singh’s friend was identified as Rohit, a resident of Moti Bagh who had set up a call centre in Pitampura in January.

The other members of the gang were identified as Mohit Bansal, a class 12 dropout, Udit, a school dropout who is well trained in speaking in an American accent, Guraman Singh, a former call centre employee and Pfokreni, of Manipur, who had experience working in a call centre.

Police have recovered 106 hard disks, 28 SIM cards, 4 servers and ₹7.40 lakh from the six men.

Deputy commissioner of police (crime) Rajesh Deo said, “During a probe, we received inputs from department of telecommunication (DoT) that the racket is being operated from Anupam Building in Pitampura, Delhi.”

A team of DoT, led by two directors, also joined the police and a raid was conducted at the location. “As many as 106 telecallers and the six accused, who worked as supervisors, were present there and detained. They were found making and receiving international calls using a dialer through VoIP (voice over internet protocol),” the DCP said.

Additional commissioner of police (crime) Rajiv Ranjan said the six men had registered with the Google search engine’s paid service licence for helping customers troubleshoot tech issues.

“They had the top slot in search results, due to which most of the customers dialled their call centre’s number. They used to ask the customers to buy Google Play cards and divulge details on the pretext of fixing their technical issues,” Ranjan said.

Ranjan said the security code provided by the customer was given to a blocker for a higher rate. “The blocker would get it redeemed online in China and route money through illegal transactions to them,” he said.