Indore: State Cyber Cell raided two illegal call centres in the city on Tuesday and busted a racket of duping American citizens of thousands of US dollars.
The cyber cell arrested 78 people, including two prime accused. The accused posed as American vigilance agency officials and scared US citizens by telling them that their Social Security numbers were being used to commit crimes. The accused have stolen Social Security numbers data from various websites.
Interestingly, one of the prime accused, who was running the call centre, is Class VIII passout.
Youth from Maharashtra, Gujarat and Delhi were working at the centres. Two persons, including a prime accused, and others were on the run till filing of this report.
According to Superintendent of Police (Cyber Cell) Jitendra Singh, a tip-off was received that some people were operating call centres and duping US citizens. The officials came to know that the two call centres were being operated in the city by accused named Javed, Rahil Abbasi, Sunny Chouhan, Shahrukh, Keval Sindhu and their accomplices, Singh said.
He said that two teams were formed to raid the call centres. The teams raided two places simultaneously and arrested 61 youths and 19 girls.
Prime accused Javed was also arrested by the police, while other two prime accused Rahil and Sunny were not present in the city during the raid, Singh added. Sources said that Rahil and Sunny have fled to the US.
Singh said that the accused have fetched data for Social Security number of US residents from websites. The youth working in the centres used to call the US citizens posing as officials of America vigilance agency.
Singh added that the accused informed them about their Social Security numbers and told them that their number was being used in criminal activities like money laundering, drug trafficking etc. Thereafter, they used to dupe American citizens of US$ 50 to US$ 5,000.
Singh further said that Javed was the mastermind. Javed and Rahil hail from Ahmedabad. They were brought to the city to run the centres by Sunny. It is believed that Sunny is the resident of Indore. The cyber cell has launched a manhunt to nab the absconding accused.
