BHOPAL: Two fake call centres indulging and aiding cyber frauds have been busted in two separate parts of Madhya Pradesh in the last three days.
The first fake call centre was busted in the obscure Shamgarh town of western MP’s Mandsaur district on November 14, with the arrest of 22 youngsters, 18 of them being girls.
Importantly, the majority of those arrested by the state police’s cyber cell from Mandsaur, hail from two villages – Kanwla and Dhanpur.
The Kanwla village, which is also nicknamed ‘MP’s mini Goa’ owing to its scenic location near the backwaters of the Gandhi Sagar Dam, has emerged as the hub of the fake call centre, as most of those arrested as well as the absconding head of the centre Kushal Kewat, hail from that village only.
“The fake call centre worked on the basis of a fake diamond research company website and related fake app. The racket’s mastermind managed to get the details of demat account holders from across the country, after which the call centre employees (who were paid between Rs 4500 to Rs 5000 monthly besides additional incentives) trapped these account holders promising big returns on their investments in blue chip companies. Those who fell in the fake call centre’s trap were shown inflated returns on their investments, but when they demanded their investments back, the phone numbers through which they were contacted were switched off forever,” DIG of state police’s cyber cell Mohd Yusuf Qureshi told this newspaper on Sunday.
After busting the fake call centre, the police are now hunting for the absconding head of the fake call centre, Kushal Kewat, whose arrests will further help the investigators, dig deep into the inter-state links of the racket, particularly as Kewat has worked in the past in stock broking/investments facilities in Mandsaur, adjoining Rajasthan and Indore.
“Though the investigations are right now in the incipient stages, still the probe so far makes us believe that the demat account holders across the country, could’ve been duped of crores of rupees, since July, when the fake call centre was functioning,” Qureshi said.
Two days after the fake call centre was busted in Mandsaur district, cops in Hanumanganj area of the state capital Bhopal, unearthed another fake call centre, being operated by youngsters hailing from Bihar’s Patna, Jehanabad and Nalanda districts.
Seven youngsters, including a 21-year-old woman from Patna (all aged between 18 and 26 years) have so far been arrested. The arrested men and a woman first created fake identification proofs and then used those documents to open bank accounts. These accounts were later used for parking proceeds of cyber fraud by the racket members or else sold to other cyber fraudsters for Rs 10,000 per account.
Before running the fake call centre in Bhopal, the alleged fraudsters had indulged in similar frauds from other cities of the country, including Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Lucknow, Indore and Hyderabad.