NEW DELHI: The Delhi Police in coordination with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Legal Attache and Interpol has arrested four men for allegedly cheating US citizens of more than 20 million dollars by running fake call centres, officials said on Sunday.
The accused Parth Armarkar (28), Vatsal Mehta (29), Deepak Arora (45) and Prashant Kumar (45) were arrested from different states of the country, they said. The police said the accused operated call centres in Uganda and in several parts of India, including Delhi.A senior police officer said Mehta, a native of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, is the head of the crime syndicate and supervised the functioning of the Uganda-based call centre.
Special Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) H S Dhaliwal said their team received information through secret informers, FBI and Interpol that some international cyber criminals based in India, US and Uganda were running call centres by posing as employees of US Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and other US agencies.
One of the accused, Armarkar, he said, impersonated as Uttam Dhillon, who had served as the acting administrator of the US Drug Enforcement Administration and as the director of Interpol Washington. The accused defrauded victims of over 6 million USD through the call centres. He is an Indian national and visits India occasionally, he added.
“The FBI and the Delhi Police shared information on Armarkar, which led our team to identify his whereabouts in Ahmedabad from where he was running part of the criminal activities,” the police said.
Accused defrauded victims of $6 million
One of the accused, Armarkar impersonated as Uttam Dhillon, who served as the acting administrator of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.He defrauded victims of over 6 million USD through the call centres, said the police.