Calcutta police have arrested 10 people who were allegedly running a fraudulent call centre in Park Circus posing as members of the support staff of a US-based software company.
Police said the 10 accused were running the call centre on the ground floor of a building on Nasiruddin Road.
“They posed as employees of the refund department of the company. However, while pretending to help clients get refunds, they would extract their account details and cheat them,” an officer said.
The racketeers were allegedly using voice-over internet protocol calls to people living in US to dupe them.
During raids conducted at the homes of the 10 accused, four laptops, ATM cards and 11 mobile phones were seized.
The accused were produced in court on Wednesday and remanded in police custody till February 11.
In October, Calcutta police had closed down two fledgling call centres whose employees were allegedly posing as members of the Microsoft technical support team and swindling customers in the UK and the US out of lakhs of rupees.
In many cases the racketeers had got hold of the customers’ bank details, causing huge monetary losses to them.
In two simultaneous raids, the detective department of the Calcutta police had arrested seven people connected with the two call centres — one in Topsia and the other on Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road.
The same month, the national fraud and cyber crime chief of the City of London Police, Jonathan Frost, had called up Calcutta police commissioner Anuj Sharma to congratulate him for busting a fake call centre racket that had duped almost 23,000 people in the UK.
Sources said hundreds of call centres had come up in Calcutta to provide online support to clients of national and international companies.
The police said it was difficult to keep a tab on the nature of service provided by call centres unless there were specific complaints.
“Thousands of unemployed youths in Calcutta have taken up this business of making quick money by purchasing client data. There is a lot of money involved. But it is difficult to zero in on culprits without any specific complaint of cheating,” said an officer.
