5 held for duping people from foreign countries by posing as tech support firm staff

New Delhi, July 30

Five people, including a woman, were arrested for allegedly running an illegal call centre and duping citizens of foreign countries by posing as representatives of a tech support company, police said on Friday.

The owner—Pritpal Singh (35) along with his associates Mayank (26), Chandan Gupta (24), Subham Kumar (22), and Kinkini Das (35) were operating the call centre from the third floor of a building in south Delhi's Malviya Nagar, they said.

Based on a tip off, the police conducted a raid on Thursday and arrested the accused targeting foreign citizens, mainly from the US, on the pretext of giving them tech support, stating that their system was vulnerable to cyberattacks, police said.

Among the employees, Subham and Chandan were junior callers while Mayank was a senior caller, police said, adding they were working here for the last seven months and called up customers using a high-end technical software "X-lite/ Eye Beam" through cloud servers.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (South) Atul Kumar Thakur said, "The accused approached US-based customers using "X-lite/ Eye Beam" and duped them on the pretext of providing them tech support if they paid a fee of 100 to US 400 US dollars. "They induced the customer to provide the amount through various payments methods or wallets."

"They were taking wrongful gains as they first sent a pop-up message or a bug to the customer's computer after obtaining their data from cloud servers and stated that their system has been attacked, and later ask them to obtain tech support from them to eradicate the pop-up or bug from their systems," he said.

The police claimed to have recovered 13 computers with two pen drives and two notebooks from the call centre. — PTI