MUMBAI: The nine call centres busted by the Thane police for posing as operatives of the US Internal Revenue Service to scam US nationals could be just the tip of the iceberg and part of a larger international racket, police said on Thursday.
The call centers operating from three buildings on Mira Road, a busy western suburb located 50 km from downtown Mumbai, were raided by a Crime Branch-CID team of the Thane police Tuesday night.
They found 772 persons involved in the scam. Seventy of them were arrested, and 630 more were listed as accused. “It could be much bigger,” said a police officer.
The callers, trained to speak English with an American accent, would make VOIP calls to Americans, posing as Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officers, and seek details of their finances and account numbers. At the other end, rattled people would share details, and the money would be siphoned off.
“It is a very big fraud, something very difficult to imagine,” an official of the Maharashtra State Intelligence Department (SID) said.
Three call centres that were raided have been identified as Hari Om IT Park, Universal Outsourcing Services and Oswal House.
The police said they seized 851 hard disks, internet servers, DVRs, laptops, all worth more than Rs 1 crore.