Hyderabad Cyber Crime Police arrests inter-state fraudsters gang

Hyderabad: The Cyber Crime police on Monday said that they have arrested a 17-member inter-state cyber fraudsters gang, including 14 accused from West Bengal, who are targeting foreign nationals through VOIP calls by impersonating as executives of reputed Antivirus companies and cheating them.
On reliable information, Cyber Crime Inspector of Police K.Srinivas and his team conducted raid following due procedure on an illegal call center and apprehended Mohammad Rafi Kavungal, Gandham Veera Ram Naresh and Kanithi Kalyan Chakravarthy ( all residents of Hyderabad), for their illegal activities, Cyberabad Commissioner of Police Stephen Raveendra said in a release here.
The accused were registered with a reputed e-commerce company as seller to project as their legal business and later, 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 per cent commission on the transaction amount collected by the call centers by cheating foreign nationals.
There are various call centers run by Manish Gupta and for generating inbound calls to his call centers, the suppliers send bulk emails, bulk SMSs and run google Adwords.
The recipients of such emails/SMSs especially foreign nationals call on the phone number mentioned in such email and SMS.
Gupta and his team receive such calls and convince them to purchase or renew license for anti-virus software and make them pay for such service.
After making the payments, they will not offer any service and cheat the innocent callers.
The accused were brought to the city and a suo-moto case was registered under sections 419, 420, 468 r/w 34 IPC, 66 C & D IT Act, 2008 at Cyber Crime Police station here. Most of the victims were foreign nationals mostly from Peru, USA, Thailand and Singapore, the release said.
They seized ten laptops, 20 mobiles, four routers and other documents from the accused, the release added.