Hyderabad, Dec 2 (IANS): Cyberabad police on Thursday claimed to have busted the biggest cyber fraud racket in the country with the arrest of 28 members of two gangs, who were operating call centres from the national capital.
While one gang was running a fake call centre of State Bank of India (SBI) in Delhi, the other was operating a call centre in Noida by offering loans. The accused allegedly cheated people in different parts of the country to the tune of several crores.
Cyberabad Police Commissioner Stephen Ravindra said they busted the SBI Call Centre racket in Delhi's Uttam Nagar and arrested a gang of 14 members including a woman. They were involved in 14 cases in Cyberabad Commissionerate and 195 cases all over India. They pretended to be SBI employees and cheated citizens to the tune of crores of rupees, he said.
The accused are Nikhil Madaan, Deepanshu Madan, Pinky Kumari, Rohit Mathur, Hitesh Chopra, Vikas, Sanjay Kumar, Prabhat Kumar Singh, Saksham Raj, Anuj Kumar, Sameer Mishra, Murshid Alam, Farman Hussain, and Gourav Bharara.
Barring Alam and Hussain, who are from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh respectively, all the accused are residents of New Delhi.
According to police, fraudsters have vast experience in the banking field and they have collected data of SBI credit card holders from agents.
Main accused Madaan established a call center in Uttam Nagar, and took reseller ids for the spoofing applications like MoSIP and Silver Dialer. Fraudsters use these applications to generate calls through the desired number to dissimulate the original number. By using spoofing call applications, they contacted the SBI credit card holders as SBI employees by disguising the original customer care number. Then they collected card details and OTPs by misguiding the customers in the name of activation of card or deactivation of insurance or enhancing the credit card limit etc.
The police took up the investigation after a man lodged a complaint that he lost over Rs 1.64 lakh after he shared card details and OTP with the fraudsters, who contacted him to issue new credit cards as the old cards were about to expire.
The police seized from them a four-wheeler, a bike, 30 mobile phones, three laptops and a router.
The Cyber Crime Police of Cyberabad also busted a fake loan call center racket operating from Sector-63, Noida and arrested 14 persons including 7 women for luring customers in the name of Dhani Loan Bazaar.
The accused are involved in 9 cases in Cyberabad Commissionerate, 5 cases in other districts of Telangana, and 13 cases in other states. They called the citizens posing as genuine lending platforms and cheated them to a tune of lakhs of rupees.
The police took up the investigation after a man lodged a complaint that the accused cheated him to the tune of Rs 2.17 lakh by offering him a personal loan of Rs 5 lakh.
Main organiser Abhishek Midhra is absconding. Rajendra Kumar is also an organiser.
The other accused are Brijesh Kumar Thakur, Akash Bhati, Nitin Kumar, Dileep Kumar (absconding), Hemalata, Ritik Singh, Hemant Rawat, Radhika Yadav, Sadhana Kumar, Saraswati Halder, Kajal Singh, Nisha Varun, Kanchan Singh, and Puthan.