Cyber police busts fake call centres in Kashmir, 23 held

STATE TIMES NEWS

Srinagar: The Cyber Police in Kashmir busted several fake call centres on Wednesday and arrested 23 people for allegedly duping people by posing as executives of multinational companies on phone.
Acting on information that some fake call centres were operating in the city, Cyber Police Station, Kashmir Zone launched an investigation, a police spokesperson said.
Cyber Police Station, Kashmir Zone, Srinagar constituted several teams in collaboration with the district police and carried out multiple raids in Rangreth, Karfali Mohalla-Habbakadal and Natipora, he said.
“During these raids, 23 accused persons involved in running of these fake call centres were arrested,” he said.
During the course of investigation, it was established that some fake call centre employees were posing as executives of multinational companies and duping innocent people in the name of offering technical support and solutions to their software problems, the spokesperson said.
The accused were making cold calls, and sending e-mails and pop-ups on the victims’ computer screens. They used to take remote access of their computers and infect their systems with malware. Then they would ask for money from the victims in return for help by posing as technical support executives, he added.
The spokesperson said the accused also used electronic signatures of the victims for illegal financial gains. These fake call centres would mostly call international citizens and demand their financial and bank details illegally so as to extort money from them.
“These fake call centres have been identified as Secure Tech Rangreth Srinagar, YSS Micro Technologies Rangreth and Vertex Technology, Karfalli Mohalla Srinagar,” he said.
According to the spokesperson, fake call centres earn anything between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 20 lakh per day, depending upon the size of their set-up.
These scammers mostly cheat people staying in foreign countries by posing as technical support executives, insurance agents, law enforcement officers, bank officials and online shopping site executives, he said.
The major issue is that young students are getting attracted to such call centres due to higher salaries. These fake call centres earlier used to be limited to big cities only. However, now they have mushroomed in other parts of the country as well, he said.