Eight men who were running a call centre in Golf Green have been arrested for allegedly impersonating customer care executives of an e-commerce giant and cheating people in Canada and other countries.
The police said they raided the call centre — on the second floor of a building at 44 New Bikramgarh — on Saturday night and caught the men making fraudulent calls.
“Nine monitors, 10 hard disks, two routers, 12 mobile phones and Rs 48,810 were seized from the office,” said an officer of Golf Green police station.
A senior officer said the gang had manipulated internet search engines and edited websites to insert contact numbers of their choice.
“This is a common practice among fraudsters. They insert their phone numbers as customer care numbers in the search engines. People searching for the customer care number of that company may come across the fraudulent numbers and interact with people posing as customer care officials of that company,” an officer at the police headquarters at Lalbazar said.
Fraudsters tell callers to download a screen-sharing app and ask for a passcode, with which they gain control of the phone or the computer from where the call is being made.
“Once the client shares the passcode, the fraudster can access the person’s device and make online transactions on his or her behalf,” the investigator said.
“In such cases, the person whose phone or computer has been compromised could be duped even if he or she does not share any one-time password sent to the device because the fraudsters have access to the device where the OTP is generated.”
“One should not download any application based on suggestions from a stranger,” the officer said.