A group of men have been arrested for allegedly running a fraudulent call centre in Behala posing as the support team of a software company.

The men would target people in the UK and Australia. They would convince them that their internet system had a glitch and offer “help” to fix the problem, police said.

They would then gain remote access to their devices and make fraudulent transactions, the police said.

Based on specific information, a police team arrested nine persons from Behala on Tuesday night.

“The first step would be to convince their victims located in the UK and Australia that there was a problem in their internet system. Then the fraudsters would win their confidence and gain remote access to their mobile phones or laptops,” said an officer of the south-west division of Kolkata Police.

The next step, the officer said, was to obtain the banking details of the victims by searching their devices.

“Once the fraudsters had access to the bank details, they would make unauthorised transactions. By the time the victims realised that they were being duped, the calls
would be disconnected,” said the officer.

The calls were made using voice internet protocol which are hard to trace, the police
said.

A senior police officer at Lalbazar said such fraudulent call centres that target foreigners have been busted earlier, too.

“It is convenient for fraudsters to target people abroad as overseas transactions are difficult to track and the complainant often loses patience and interest to pursue it,” said the officer.

The police identified the arrested men as Sujay Ghosh, Musharraf Hussain, Sibu Dhenga, Milan Bose, Bikash Shaw, Suman Banik, Sheikh Shahid, Kuntal Bhattacharya and Koushik Patra.

All nine were produced in a court on Thursday and were remanded in police custody till November 11.