Mumbai: The investigation into the fake call centres busted by the Mumbai crime branch last week revealed that, the call centres had been operational since 2016 and suspected to have duped several hundred people so far.
The call centres have employed a different modus operandi and have been duping people on the pretext of investing into share markets as a reason they managed stay out of the radar, said a crime branch official. Following the raid the crime branch arrested it's owners Aditya Maheshwari, 40 and Giriraj Damani, 39.
The police have seized three servers, 4 hard drives, 3 laptops, a CPU, 2 mobile phones. "We are still scanning the data to ascertain how many people have been duped by them so far. We are requesting people to come forward and complain if they have been duped similarly", said investigation officer, Mansingh Patil of Crime Branch unit 11. Following the raid, police have recovered ₹ 90 lakh from company's accounts.
Last week, crime branch unit 11 raided two call centres operating from Malad for allegedly duping Indian and foreign nationals mostly of Gulf countries. The accused under the pretext of being a caller from Singapore induced people to invest into national and international stock markets through their portal "70trades.com" and promises high returns. The victims were asked to invest $200 initially and promised profit of ₹1500 -₹2000 per day, however after the payment were made they stopped further conversation, said police.
"The call centres did not have any mechanism of refund, as the number they have given for complaints was non functional. The victims used to suspect that they made investment into Singapore based company and failed to report matter to police, said police. While speaking the accused used Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) making it difficult to trace them, the police added.
Now the crime branch are approaching Singapore authorities through Indian embassy as 70trade.com's parent company's "Full House" is registered in Singapore.
At the time of raid, police found 70 people working there, of them 59 were tele callers however they were unaware of the fraud and are likely to be made witnesses in the case, said police.
The salary of a tele caller was around ₹ 20,000 per month however some of them were earning ₹ 50,000 per month with incentives.
