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Call Centres
The Enforcement Directorate raided some call centres located in and around Chandigarh which were allegedly cheating foreigners in the guise of providing technical support services and were laundering funds worth crores of rupees, official sources said on Thursday. The searches were launched on the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday in Chandigarh and adjoining cities of Mohali in Punjab and Panchkula in Haryana under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), they said. These call centres were allegedly cheating foreigners in the guise of providing non-existent tech support services. It was found that the companies operating these call centres had counterpart companies abroad to receive "fraudulent" funds through various payment gateways, which were then remitted to India through banking channels as well as hawala, the sources said. According to the websites of these companies, they provide software support services like web designing and fixed wireless
The CBI has booked 10 call centre operators for allegedly cheating the customers of US-based technology behemoths Amazon and Microsoft in the name of offering technical support and luring them with attractive offers for plan upgrades, officials on Friday said. The central probe agency had registered the FIR against 10 call centres on a complaint from the Microsoft of which five also appear as suspects in the case registered on the basis of Amazon's complaint, they said. The two cases were registered on October 4 last year but have been made public on the orders of the special court, the officials said. These call centres allegedly charged the foreigners from their accounts by offering them technical solutions when they tried to activate their fire stick or other Amazon devices, they said. In case of Microsoft, it is alleged that the perpetrators sent 'pop-up' messages to the victims, asking them to call the number to sort out the purported threat that their computers are facing. O
Around 90 per cent of people surveyed stated that they are getting pesky calls from individuals selling financial services, real estate projects and other products despite being registered on the Do Not Disturb list, says a survey by LocalCircles. A vast majority of respondents surveyed have shared that they get spam calls every day and most of the calls are from individuals selling financial services and real estate products and services, according to the survey. The survey comprising seven questions claims to have received 60,000 responses from 378 districts but the number of replies on each question varied. In response to a question on the number of calls that people get, 90 per cent of respondents shared that they get at least 1-2 calls daily while 3 per cent said that they get over 10 pesky calls daily. Similarly, 90 per cent of respondents shared that they have been getting unwanted, pesky, sales promotional or robo phone calls on their mobile number in the last 12 months ...
About 70 per cent of the 10,000-odd calls made to a mental healthcare call centre here were by women, with a study suggesting the digital facility has made it easy for women to talk about their issues from home without being stigmatised. The call centre under the central government's Tele MANAS initiative was established at the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Rainawari here in November last year. Since its launch, the call centre has received more than 10,000 calls. "About 70 per cent of those calls were from women," Dr Arshad Hussain, a renowned psychiatrist working at the institute, told PTI. He said the institute conducted a study to ascertain why a majority of the distress calls were made by women. "What could be happening is that women may be finding it easy to call from their homes and talk about their distress without being stigmatised," Hussain said. "Recently, we had a guest faculty here. We were told that in other centres, there are more men calling. This
The Delhi Police has arrested three men for allegedly running illegal call centres here and defrauding senior citizens based in the US on the pretext of providing them with technology support against "malfunctioning" of their computers, officials said on Friday. The accused, identified as Jatin Lamba, Harshad Madaan and Vikas Gupta, were held in Delhi after police conducted overnight raids, whereas their counterpart Jayant Bhatia was arrested by Canadian Law Enforcement Agency from Toronto and Kulwinder Singh was arrested by the FBI, USA from New Jersey, they said. Police said Jatin Lamba with his brother Gagan Lamba was running a company from Ganesh Nagar, New Delhi camouflaging as a tech support company and used to run call centres that targeted US citizens. Deputy Commissioner of Police (IFSO, Special Cell) Prashant K Gautam said Gupta has been involved in the scam as calling agent to provide tech support to fix the technical glitch in the computer of the victim. Madaan, the DCP