New Delhi: A one-room call centre, a handful of employees who could pull off an American accent, a carefully drafted script, a database, and a Russian software programme — these are some of the tools that two West Delhi-based garment shop owners allegedly used to scam 20,000 US and Canadian citizens out of more than US$10 million (Rs 80 crore) under the guise of “tech support” services.
Business seemed to have boomed for at least 10 years, until the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Canadian law enforcement authorities, and Delhi Police cracked down on the suspects last December.
According to police sources, this is how the scam worked: the Delhi men used a software programme to generate “pop-up windows” that would appear on the computer screens of their targets, mostly senior citizens.
These pop-ups would warn the targets about “fraudulent activity” on their systems and instruct them to contact a number provided on the screen to get the issue fixed.
When the North American victims called the number, they were connected to a call centre in West Delhi where the young employees, armed with their well-rehearsed script, would convince them to pay a certain amount to get the glitch fixed. Many of the anxious elderly targets agreed to pay, at times even more than once.
The accused, police say, had been operating since 2012, but had ramped up operations after the Covid-19 pandemic struck and more people started working from home. As the tech support scam picked up pace, the alleged fraudsters expanded their team, even stationing a ‘representative’ in Canada.
The FBI in the USA eventually busted the operation four months ago and traced the crime back to Delhi.
“As soon as the FBI approached us and informed us about these call centres running in Delhi and how more than 20,000 victims had fallen prey, we instantly put our teams on the job,” said H.S. Dhaliwal, special commissioner of police (special cell), speaking to ThePrint. “These fraudsters preyed on the fears of elderly people.”
Dhaliwal said the FBI shared complaints from two specific victims of the fraud with the Delhi Police through the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), along with some intelligence about the suspects.
“Acting upon the complaints and inputs, the IFSO (Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations unit) registered a case and started the search,” Dhaliwal said. “In a short span, our teams caught the accused and busted their network.”
According to the police, the alleged masterminds of the operation were brothers Jatin and Gagan Lamba, who ran a company called PC Support and Care in Ganesh Nagar, where their call centre was based.
Delhi police arrested Jatin and Gagan Lamba and their alleged associates Vikas Gupta and Harshad Madaan mid-December. Gupta was a “calling agent”, tasked with speaking to targets on the pretext of giving them “tech support”, and Madaan helped mobilise the funds collected from the fraud to the account of PC Support and Care, police said.
Around the same time as the Delhi arrests, alleged accomplice Jayant Bhatia was arrested in Toronto by the Canadian authorities, and Kulwinder Singh was taken into custody by the FBI from New Jersey.
Meanwhile, the Lamba brothers’ 50-year-old aunt Meghna Kumar, a New Jersey resident, pleaded guilty last December in a federal court for her role in facilitating monetary transactions connected to the scheme.
Here’s a look at how the scam started, operated, and how the FBI tracked it to Delhi.
‘Aunt gave brothers advice on quick money’
Tucked away in the bylanes of West Delhi’s Ganesh Nagar, a small call centre was the hub of a transnational crime operation. Here, youngsters were given ‘useful’ skills like speaking with an American drawl and operating software to select targets and send scam pop-ups to their systems.
According to investigators, the head honchos were Gagan Lamba, a BA graduate, and his brother Jatin Lamba, who discontinued his education after class 12. They ran a garment shop in addition to their other ‘business’, but a Delhi Police officer privy to the investigation said this largely functioned as a “front”.
Another member of the core ‘scam’ team was Harshad Madaan, a commerce graduate.
While Madaan started working with the brothers as a tele-caller, he was not very successful in that role, the officer said. However, he purportedly found another way to be useful.
“Madaan told the brothers that he could provide them with two bank accounts in the US to hold the ill-gotten money and would also help trip it to India,” the officer said.
But how did the men come up with such a scam?
According to the police, the inspiration came from the Lamba brothers’ aunt, Meghna Kumar, a US citizen, who had allegedly been running similar cons and had been arrested in the past.
“It was a woman called Meghna Kumar, a US citizen and aunt of Jatin and Gagan Lamba, who helped the two brothers run the scam. She has been in the US for the past 20 years and has already been arrested there,” the officer said.
“She told the brothers that she could help them make some quick money,” the officer said.
Soon after, in 2012, the Lambas set up a company called PC Support and Care as a “tech support” provider and also kicked off their operation to scam people in the US, the officer said.
Russian software, ‘Microsoft issue’, expensive ‘fix’
The backbone of the tech support scam was specialised software that generated pop-ups and sent them to the computers of identified targets.
This software, a police source said, was sourced from a man called “Veldemor” in Russia.
“During questioning, the men said that they had procured the software from a Russian man who introduced himself as Veldemor. We, however, could not gather much on this man. The accused were not able to give any specific address or name of the company from where the software was procured,” the officer said.
With this and other software in hand, running the scam was a breeze.
“The scam involved alerting victims to a supposed Microsoft issue and directing them to a designated telephone number on a pop-up ad to address it,” the officer said.
After this, the alleged scamsters would ask the targets to give them permission to access their desktops so they could “fix” the issue.
“Once victims were convinced to pay to fix the non-existent issue, the accused would take control of their computer through a voluntarily shared code of any RDP (Remote Desktop Program) like AnyDesk, LogMeIn etc,” the officer said.
According to a US Department of Justice release, the scamsters would remove the pop-ups once granted access to the desktop and leave a text file with payment instructions, ranging “from hundreds to thousands of dollars”.
The victims paid through cheque, money order, or PayPal, the Delhi Police officer said.
After tricking their targets, the next step for the alleged fraud ring was processing their ill-gotten gains in a way that evaded the attention of authorities.
US shell companies, ‘hawala’ suspicions
To receive the “fraudulent gains” from their elderly marks, the men opened two shell companies in the US, WebMaster and Webleaders, complete with bank accounts. The funds from here were then funnelled to the Lamba brothers’ PC Support and Care bank account, the officer said.
The police allege that Meghna Kumar was the owner of the fake company Webleaders, and helped Jatin and Gagan Lamba hold the money collected from the victims.
“The two companies were fraudulently created in the US just to collect the amount from victims there. These funds were then transferred using wire services to the account of PC Support and Care (company of Jatin and Gagan Lamba), in Delhi by accused Harshad Madaan,” explained the officer.
Madaan allegedly received a commission for each transaction, he added.
“The forensic scrutiny of his laptop led to the recovery of the statement of the commission that he received from PC Support and Care for facilitating the transfer of the cheated amount from the victims to their account,” the officer said.
Upon examining the bank accounts of PC Support and Care, investigators discovered huge transactions from abroad, with total credit entries amounting to Rs 4.37 crore between January 2012 and November 2020, the officer added.
According to the officer, it is also suspected that some funds came to India through hawala channels and some of it was also invested in cryptocurrency. This aspect, however, is still under investigation.
How FBI traced crime to Delhi
The fraud suspects were ultimately let down by the tools of their trade. The FBI was able to narrow down on them by tracing the IP addresses of the fraudulent pop-ups and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls.
“The FBI tracked the IP addresses of the VoIP calls and also the pop-ups to trace the accused. When the data was analysed, it was found that the pop-ups were being generated from Delhi, India,” the officer said.
Bank transactions were the next giveaway.
The FBI analysed the US bank accounts used to receive money and found that they were registered to fake companies. They also discovered that money from those accounts was being sent to the account of PC Support and Care, the company of the two accused brothers in India.
“Since the company was registered in the name of the brothers, they were tracked. As they were running the operation from their home, the call centre too was traced,” the officer said.
Further investigation revealed that besides PC Support and Care, another company called Techspine Technologies was incorporated, with Vikas Gupta and Aditya Gupta as its directors, to start another such call centre in Faridabad.
During his interrogation, Vikas Gupta told the police that this company was also created to cheat US citizens, but it could not take off and he ended up as a calling agent on behalf of PC Support and Care.
What next for the accused?
The accused who have been arrested in India will face a trial here since an FIR has been registered against them by the Delhi Police, based on the two complaints forwarded to them by the FBI. They have been booked under various Indian Penal Code sections, including cheating and criminal conspiracy, as well as sections of the IT Act.
The suspects arrested in the US and Canada, will face the law in their respective jurisdictions.
“The men we arrested from Delhi are in judicial custody and will face trial here. In case the FBI wants to question them for their case, they will move for extradition, but we have not received any such request from them for now,” the officer said.
“We are also looking at a larger nexus that may be at play in Delhi. We are trying to ascertain if there were more such call centres that were operating in the capital,” he added.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
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