BHOPAL: The state cyber cell has arrested five men accused of running a fake call centre and duping scores of people by luring them with low-interest loans from Dewas, Shajapur, Rajgarh and Ujjain districts on Thursday. The main accused in the whole case is absconding and investigations are on to nab him. The police have also recovered about 40 bank passbooks and ATM cards from the arrested accused.
According to cyber cell, the fake call centre employing about 25 women as calling girls was run by brothers Sanjay and Satish Sharma, of Sarangpur in Shajapur district. The cyber police station of Ujjain had received a complaint from Shoukat Ali, in which he told the police that a few months ago he received a call on his phone from a woman named Jyoti. She identified herself as an employee of Sundaram Finance company and offered him personal loan on low interest rates to which he agreed. The employee then told him that his loan had been sanctioned and asked to deposit a particular amount of money in the name of some formalities.
The woman gave him an account number to deposit the money which he did several times. After depositing money many times in the given account number, Ali called her to know the status of his loan on which she kept on making excuses and after sometime stopped picking his phone calls. Based on the complaint, the police traced Jyoti Tiwari and rounded her up. They then asked her about the fraud on which she told them that she along with other women were recruited by the Sharma brothers for a call centre in Maksi and Dewas on a monthly salary. Based on the information, the police raided their places at Dewas, Shajapur, Rajgarh and Ujjain and arrested five men Satish, Vikas, Sanjay Patel, Rajkumar Patel and Ramakant Joshi while main accused Sanjay is still absconding.
“Out of the five accused, Sanjay Patel and Rajkumar Patel used to run mobile phone and accessories shop. They were arrested because they gave many SIM cards without proper verification to be used by the call centre girls to call people and dupe them. Out of the other accused, Vikas and Ramakant used to keep an eye on potential loan applicants and help the Sharma brothers in recruiting women in the call centres. Satish and his main accused brother Sanjay used to look after the proper training of the call centre girls and the transfer of the money collected,” said assistant inspector general (cyber cell), Shailendra Singh Chauhan.
Chauhan also said the accused also asked their victims to deposit their bank passbooks and ATM cards as guarantee against the loan to be given to them.
“They used the passbooks and the ATM cards to transfer the collected money and then withdraw that with the help of ATM cards. By taking these two things they also tried to avoid their victims from checking their account balance so that they cannot know about the illegal transactions made through their account. The accused used to take care of the call centre girls by throwing lavish parties at big hotels in Bhopal and Indore and even offered them commission for every victim they made through their calls. The police are now searching the absconding main accused and would soon present the arrested accused before court,” said Chouhan.
