A fake call centre has been busted here and 12 cyber fraudsters were arrested, police said on Sunday.

On October 19, the surveillance team of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, East, and the police team of PGI police station, Lucknow, successfully apprehended 12 cyber fraudsters operating from a flat in Everest Enclave, Sector 18 of Vrindavan Yojana in Lucknow.

The accused were arrested following a tip-off. During the raid, cops seized a substantial amount of electronic equipment, including 11 laptops, a Samsung tablet, two airfiber units, two routers, five headphones, two mice and 17 mobile phones.

The cyber criminals employed a sophisticated technique to target foreign nationals, primarily from the United States and Canada. They would intentionally introduce errors or bugs into the victims' laptops or computer systems, causing pop-up messages to appear. When the affected individuals attempted to resolve the issue, the fraudsters would contact them, posing as technical support agents, the statement said.

Under the guise of troubleshooting the computer problems, the accused would gain remote access to the victims' devices. They would then coerce the individuals into making payments, often in the form of cryptocurrency or gift cards, to supposedly resolve the non-existent issues. These fraudulent transactions resulted in significant financial losses for the victims, it said.

A case has been registered under sections 318 (4) (cheating), 319 (2) (cheating by personation), 316 (2) (criminal breach of trust), 338 (forgery of valuable security, will, etc.), 336(3) (forgery), 340(2) (forged document or electronic record and using it as genuine), 61(2) (criminal conspiracy) and 111 (organised crime) of the BNS and the IT Act.

The arrested accused persons have been identified as Chandan alias Ricky (Kanpur), Mohan Shyam Sharma (Bharatpur, Rajasthan), Utkarsh Gold Smith (Lucknow), Neeraj Kumar (Rae Bareli), Karan Singh (Lucknow), Tarun Gupta (Sant Kabir Nagar), Neeraj Pandey (Delhi), Siddharth Kashyap (Gonda), Rituraj Gupta (Lucknow), Somnath Singh (Bahraich), Virat Kumar (Chandauli) and Ramjanak (Basti).

Efforts are being made to ascertain the criminal history of all the accused persons, the statement said.

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