The Cyberabad police on Friday, August 11, busted a fake international call centre in connection with duping US citizens by posing as executives from a major e-commerce company. 115 members of the interstate gang were arrested.
According to the police, the suspects acquired contact information and personal details from a leads generation portal. The call centre's staff, utilising Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), initiated calls to US residents. During these calls, the fraudsters scared the victims by saying that parcels with dubious contents had been received under their names.
The criminals coerced the victims into purchasing gift cards to supposedly resolve the fabricated issues. The US citizens procured the gift vouchers and shared the redemption codes with the call centre employees. These codes were then used by the criminals to sell the acquired gift cards on an alternate website, often at reduced rates.
The scammers capitalised on this by receiving cryptocurrency funds upon redeeming the codes. They converted the cryptocurrency, typically in the form of USDT, using cryptocurrency exchanges. Subsequently, they sold the USDT to local bitcoin vendors and converted it into Indian currency.
The individuals responsible for orchestrating this scheme were identified as Ansari Mohirfan and Ganchi Akib, founders of AG Solutions, and Pradeep Vinod Rathod, Osman Ghani Khan, Shivam Pradhan, and Deepu Thapar, who operated Vertez Solutions. The police confiscated seven laptops, 115 CPUs, 94 monitors, and 120 mobile devices from the suspects.