Ten persons were arrested during a raid on a call centre in Rajarhat on Monday for allegedly cheating people abroad out of their money by posing as officials of the tech major Microsoft.
An officer of the Bidhannagar police said these men were working in an office named Innovious Web Solutions Private Limited, situated on the third floor of a building in Rajarhat.
They would allegedly call people in European countries posing as officials of Microsoft and dupe them.
“We raided the office following a tip-off. The accused persons were making calls mainly to people in Switzerland, Norway, Ireland and Germany, pretending to be officials of Microsoft,” said an investigator.
He said as part of their modus operandi, the fraudsters would scare a person about purported “errors, warning signals and Internet speed problems” on his or her device and then convince him or her to install some software.
“In this way, the fraudsters would get remote access to the laptop or phone of a person and make fraudulent transactions from his or her bank account," he said.
Of the 10 persons arrested, four were kingpins of the racket, the police said. Officers said the four are Soumyajit Betal from Howrah, Aditya Sharma from Narayanpur, Arpit Roy from Maniktala, and Nikhil Chouhan from New Town.
Nineteen laptops, three hard drives, 10 phones and one register were seized from the office. The accused were produced in a court in Bidhannangar on Tuesday.