The city police arrested fourteen persons from two locations on Monday night for allegedly running fake call centres.

Eleven of the arrested were allegedly making Internet calls to people in the UK, pretending to be representatives of the customer care wing of the e-commerce giant Amazon.

The remaining three were allegedly posing as employees of another US-based company and trying to cheat people by offering web-based services like web designing and market strategies on Google, the police said.

The 11 were arrested by the anti-rowdy squad of the detective department from a room on the third floor of the Webel IT Park building in Taratala.

An officer at Lalbazar said the raid at the Webel IT Park was based on a “specific tip-off”. The police allegedly caught the racketeers making Internet calls to people in the UK posing as Amazon representatives.

The police have been tracking several illegal call centres across the city over the past few weeks. They have unearthed rackets that were allegedly cheating people abroad by pretending to be employees of Amazon.

A police officer said the racketeers would use different types of tricks to lure people to buy a product online and then cheat them by accessing their mobile phones or laptops by sending a link for screen sharing.

“The first step was to call a potential buyer and play an electronic voice saying Amazon was offering discounts on certain products and to know more, the person should connect with the representative of the shopping portal. If the potential buyer agreed and dialed the number to connect to a representative, the latter would convince him or her to open a link on his computer or smartphone to access the directory of products that had discounts on them,” said an officer.

Once the person would click on the link, a spyware would be installed on his or her device and it would enable the racketeers to access the Net banking details of the victim, the officer said.

The other three accused, who were allegedly trying to dupe people by offering web-based services, were picked up by officers of Karaya police station from a building on Tiljala Road. The gang was allegedly targeting people in the UK, the US and Canada.

All 14 were produced in court on Tuesday. They have been remanded in police custody.