Cyber crime police nab 17 for international fraud

HYDERABAD: Cyber Crime police apprehended a 17-member gang for targeting foreign nationals through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls and impersonating as executives of reputed Antivirus companies and cheating them.

A raid was carried out on an illegal call center and Mohammad Rafi Kavungal, Gandham Veera Ram Naresh, Kanithi Kalyan Chakravarthy and 14 others were arrested. According to reports, they were registered with a reputed e-commerce company as seller to project as their legal business. Simultaneously they were doing illegal activity of sending bulk emails from fake email ids to foreign nationals for generating leads (in-bound calls) from those foreign nationals to the illegal call centers located in Kolkata (operated by Ryan alias Manish Gupta). They were charging Rs.250 per each call received at these illegal call centers and 25 percent commission on the transaction amount collected by the call centers by cheating foreign nationals.

Reportedly, phishing mails were made in the name of reputed Anti-Virus company asking them to renew services. On receiving the mails, U.S nationals responded to the mail and contacted the number, which was answered by these accused. They offered them to take their paid services and make the US nationals / callers pay amount through a payment app (email-to-email money transfer), Gift cards and bank accounts of Peru, USA, Thailand and Singapore. Further the gift cards were redeemed through telegram channels and money from the bank accounts was transferred through Bitcoins.

The police seized 10 laptops, 20 mobile phones, four routers, one letter head, one license agreement and one certificate of incorporation.