MUMBAI: Money laundering investigations have been initiated into two separate cases of allegedly fraudulent call centres in Nashik district, one of which was being run from a rented resort at Igatpuri. The call centres were targeting victims in the US, UK, Canada and other countries through cybercrime that involved impersonation.
The racket was exposed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in August-September, and the agency suspects the involvement of a few public servants, including police and bank officials. The Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) Mumbai unit has now initiated proceedings to trace the money trail in these two cases.
The CBI registered First Information Reports (FIRs) in August in the case of the call centre at Igatpuri, and in September in the case of two call centres run from Nashik.
The CBI had on August 8-9 busted a cybercrime racket being run from the illegal call centre in Igatpuri. Five persons were arrested – V Yadav, Shebaz, Durgesh, A Raj alias Raja and Sameer alias Kalia.
The fraudsters used a simple but clever ruse: they would pose as members of the customer-support unit of an e-commerce site. The victim would be told that there were pending orders in their account that required a payment to cancel them. The victim would then be persuaded into transferring a cancellation charge via crypto-currency or gift vouchers in wallets controlled by the scamsters, officials said.
“During searches, 62 employees working in the call centre were found operating live and in the process of cheating foreign nationals,” a CBI official had said in August. The CBI also seized unaccounted cash worth ₹1.2 crore, 500 gram of gold, seven high-end cars totally valued at ₹1 crore, apart from cyber evidence and incriminating material.
The second case involves a cyber racket that ran two illegal call centres in Nashik, which were conning UK citizens. The racket was exposed by the CBI on September 13. The CBI had arrested two persons – G Kamankar and S Kamankar – who had allegedly established the racket’s ‘command centre’ at a bungalow on Trimbak Road in Nashik, to “monitor” the illegal call centres’ work.
The illegal call centres were being run in the garb of business process outsourcing (BPO) entities, a practice where a company hires a third-party vendor to perform specific business operations or tasks.
The CBI is also probing allegations that the scamsters had bribed public servants in cash and kind to look the other way. The CBI is also verifying information that the fraudsters were allegedly collecting data on potential UK victims from a Delhi-based suspect in lieu of payment.
Investigations revealed that around 60 persons were employed at the two call centres, which used VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), spoofed numbers and fake documents to convince victims to share their credit card and debit card details. CBI officials said the victims would then be made to pay for “non-existent insurance policies”.