34 held as four call centres duping foreigners busted in Rajasthan

Four call centres operating at various locations in the city were raided and 34 people arrested for allegedly duping foreign nationals, mostly in the US, on the pretext of increasing their credit limits, police said Thursday.

The call centres also had their network in Gujarat, Meghalaya and Tripura, they said.

The police were tipped off about the call centres tricking foreigners by impersonating as agents of investment agencies, DCP (South) Yogesh Dadich said.

He said computers, laptops, mobile phones, routers, modem, dialler and networking equipment were recovered.

The DCP said 34 people, including two women, were arrested including kingpin Hardik Patel, Rahul Badal, Bhopa Bhai, Vikesh Rana of Gujarat and Gaurav Jangid of Jaipur.

The gang used to contact foreign nationals in the US by securing phone, address and bank data illegally from another gang operating in that country.

The call centre employees would target people, mostly the poor, saying their credit score was low because of which they could not avail the company's lucrative easy loan schemes, the official said.

The gang members would then present a marginal amount cheque in the targets' bank account following which they received a message on their phones that their credit limit was enhanced.

The gang members then asked their targets to return the money in form of I-Tune gift cards, bitcoins or wallmart cards.

"The cheques were actually bogus and by the time the targets realised that it was a fraud, they had paid from their pockets. The scammers got the money transferred into their offshore accounts in China and Hongkong and then the money was routed to India through Hawala trading," Additional DCP Avnish Sharma said.