New Delhi: When officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) entered a call centre in Gurugram’s DLF Cyber City Thursday, meant for “software tech support”, they stumbled upon a dark room. The room, with curtains drawn on windows, had rows of people talking over the phone in different accents.
As many as forty-three people were making calls, not for “software tech support”, but to dupe people in, among other places, the US, the UK and Europe, especially the elderly.
This operation, which was busted red-handed by a team from the CBI, had been running for the last two years during which it duped elderly individuals across countries of millions of dollars every month. The funds were channelled to Hong Kong via virtual assets and crypto currencies, according to sources in the agency.
But how did the accused, all of them within the 30-50 age bracket, pull this off?
They had ready scripts specific to each country which they rehearsed before picking up the phone. They were even trained to get their accent right. They would then contact targets in the name of tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple and use hacking claims to induce the targets to pay money for unwanted technical support services.
“They would tell people that their system had been corrupted and that they would have to troubleshoot it,” a source told ThePrint.
Victims were then induced to click on pop-ups, which in turn uploaded malicious software onto their systems, which would corrupt the machines, and subsequently, they were asked to make payments for the restoration of their systems, the sources said.
Once the target was caught in this trap, the call centre agent would access the computer of the target remotely in the guise of diagnosing the purported problem.
Once remotely connected, the agent would falsely confirm the existence of a serious computer virus or other security threat to the targets’ computer and stress the need for immediate action to prevent harm from online threats or loss of private information.
The agent would then offer to solve the problem if the target agreed to purchase security software or a support plan, costing hundreds of dollars, according to sources in the CBI.
This pattern was also highlighted in a report from the US’ Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2022 which stated that cybercriminals had absconded with a staggering $3 billion from victims aged 60 and above that year.
The call centre bust was part of an ongoing Operation CHAKRA-III aimed at dismantling the sophisticated cyber-enabled financial crime network that has been operating across multiple countries, CBI sources said.
“It was revealed that transnational cyber-enabled financial crimes in this network were being coordinated across distributed centers mainly directed from a call centre operating from DLF Cyber City, Gurugram,” said the source quoted earlier.
“The call centres kept shifting. They (the fraudsters) keep taking up new space to work from every couple of months to avoid detection. They even changed the name of the company (private software tech support company),” the source explained.
Searches were carried out in Delhi and NCR, and live cybercriminal operations were intercepted. Substantial incriminating evidence has been gathered, sources added.
The operation was executed with cooperation from other international law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and INTERPOL, according to the source mentioned earlier.
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‘Proceeds routed to Hong Kong’
According to CBI sources, it was found that proceeds of crime were routed from multiple countries to Hong Kong using ‘mule’ bank accounts.
These are accounts sold by people for money, which the fraudsters then purchase, including debit cards and net banking credentials, to carry out fraud. “A trail of money will have to be established to see where all the money went. If it was done through mule accounts or shell companies, the investigation is underway,” said the source quoted earlier.
The CBI is coordinating with law enforcement agencies in multiple countries to follow up on leads.
So far, 43 accused have been arrested from the Gurugram call centre. The CBI has also recovered 130 hard disks, 65 mobile phones, five laptops, incriminating documents, financial transaction details, call recordings, victim details, and transcripts used for targeting victims.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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