Madhapur Police Raid Fake Call Centre, Nab 115 Fraudsters

The Madhapur police today raided a fake international VOIP call centre and arrested an inter-state cyber fraudsters gang of 115 members that targeted foreigners through VOIP calls by impersonating themselves as executives of Amazon and cheating them.

On a tip-off, N Tirupathi, Inspector of police, and his team proceeded to Vittal Rao Nagar, Madhapur, and conducted the raid.

The accused were brought to the Madhapur police station and a suo-moto case was registered against them.

The accused were identified as Md Ansari Mohirfan (ARJ Solutions), Ghanchi Akib (AG Solutions), Pradeep Vinod Rathod (Vertez Solutions), Osman Ghani Khan (Vertez Solutions), Shivam Pradhan (floor leader in Vertez solutions), Deepu Thapar (floor leader in Vertez Solutions) and 109 others.

The modus operandi of the accused was collecting personal data including phone numbers from callcentresindia.com which is a leads generation portal. The employees of the call centre make then calls using the VOIP calling service provider VC Dial to US citizens posing as the US customs department / border protection cell. The fraudsters would scare them saying that they had received parcels in the victims' name containing suspicious substances.

The employees of the call centre would then collect the personal information of the US citizens - name, house address, city etc. - and later threaten them that the US custom & border protection force would initiate legal action against them, and force them to purchase gift cards / vouchers of Amazon/Apple at supermarkets so as to cancel/return the said parcel.

The US citizens who fell for this would be frightened by then, and purchase the gift vouchers and inform the call centre employees. The call centres employees would then ask them to give the redemption codes of the gift cards, and later sell them at discounted rates on the Paxful website, with the purchasers sending money to the fraudsters in the form of cryptocurrency.

The seized items included: laptops - 7, CPUs - 115, monitors - 94, routers - 4, mobiles - 120, cash - Rs 2,55,000, and an Audi car with registration no GJ-01/AX-8736.