New Delhi, Mar 20 (PTI) The police have arrested 34 people from west Delhi's Uttam Nagar area for allegedly posing as authorised representatives of tech companies, including Apple, and duping foreign nationals on the pretext of providing them technical support, officials said on Saturday.
Besides, the accused would also pose as officials of law enforcement agencies and dupe people by telling them that their social security number has been found at a crime scene and they would have to pay certain amount to avoid getting their bank accounts frozen.
The accused were running two illegal call centres in a building in Uttam Nagar, they said.
"Police got a tip-off about the call centres in Uttam Nagar. Thereafter, a raid was conducted and 34 people were arrested," Deputy Commissioner of Police (CyPad) Anyesh Roy said.
The call centre on the third-floor of the building was run by a man named Kshitiz Bali (32), a resident of Uttam Nagar, while the other centre on the fourth floor was run by Dhananjay Negi (28), a resident of Pitampura, and Abhishek (29), a resident of Dwarka, the DCP said.
Bali has been operating a fake call centre for the last four years. The victims of the scams were mostly people residing in English speaking countries, he said, adding that the accused had created multiple teams at his centre, with each one handling a designated process.
According to the police, in the first scam, the accused contacted foreign nationals by posing as officials of various law enforcement agencies and informed them that their bank accounts and other assets were being frozen as the details of their social security number had been found at a crime scene.
Once the victim became apprehensive, they asked them to share all the details of their assets, including bank accounts and the amount of money in them, officials said.
The accused told the victims that to safeguard their assets, they would have to either buy bitcoins or gift cards worth all the money in their accounts, the DCP said.
In the second scam, the accused posed as representatives of Apple's technical support team and send recorded messages to people in the US and Canada. They induced them to call a particular number for any kind of technical support related to Apple products, officials said.
When people contacted them, the accused accessed their devices and informed them that their device had been infected by a virus and in the name of cleaning up, they cheated them of thousands of US Dollars, police said.
The third scam involved the same modus operandi but this time the accused posed as representatives of the technical support team of McAfee antivirus. The victims were informed that their system has been compromised. When the victim contacted the accused, they took remote access of their computer and duped them, police added.
