New Delhi: A Delhi court Thursday granted bail to seven men accused of running a fake Apple Support call centre, after the police failed to identify any of their victims or establish a money trail, and told the court that it was still awaiting assistance from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The arrests were made after the Delhi Police Crime Branch last month raided a flat in the Gulabi Bagh area of north Delhi, claiming to have busted an international cheating operation via an illegal call centre that allegedly targeted US citizens.
The raid was conducted on the basis of a tip-off and the police officers seized laptops and mobile phones from the accused that they claimed showed the use of VoIP software and international numbers.
Granting bail to the accused, the court noted that more than three weeks after the raid, the investigation had not yielded a single victim who could be identified, nor was there any complaint from a foreign citizen or any established money trail.
The court of Chief Judicial Magistrate (North) Priyanka Rajpoot found that the investigation was still at a preliminary stage. The investigating officer admitted that the police were awaiting details from the FBI regarding the identity of victims and the money trail, and this could take another 30 to 60 days.
The court noted that the police had “no substantive material” to link the men to any specific fraud. It observed that the prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on the disclosure statements (confessions to police) of the accused, which are not admissible as evidence without independent corroboration.
The magistrate also said the accused could not be kept in judicial custody indefinitely and that there was minimal possibility of tampering with evidence in digital form. Bail was granted on a bond of Rs 50,000 and a surety bond of the same amount.
According to the police, the accused used toll-free numbers to pose as Apple Support executives and cheat US citizens. They said the victims were misled into granting remote access to their computers through ScreenConnect and other applications. Once access was obtained, the accused allegedly coerced the victims into buying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which were then transferred to wallets controlled by their associates.
The Delhi Police have registered a case under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) Sections 318 (4) and 319, dealing with cheating and impersonation.
Advocate Gurmukh Singh Arora, who represented the accused, pointed out the procedural gaps in the police probe. He argued that while the police claimed that the raid was on the basis of “secret information”, no Daily Diary (DD) entry was recorded in this regard.
A Daily Diary is a mandatory chronological log maintained at every police station and records significant events, including tip-offs.
He also pointed out that despite the scale of the alleged operation, no independent public witnesses were associated with the raid or arrests, and the devices seized were found in a “shut-down or non-operational condition”.
Since there was no identified victim, no complaint from any foreign citizen, and no money trail established so far, keeping the men in jail was unjustified, Arora argued.
The magistrate accepted that the prosecution’s case currently rested almost entirely on disclosure statements. Under settled principles of evidence law, such statements are not admissible in court without independent corroboration.
“Till date, no victim has been identified, no complaint from any affected person has been received and no money trail… has been established,” the order states. The court also noted that the evidence was digital in nature and had already been seized.
Since the laptops and phones are in police custody, the possibility of tampering is minimal, it said, adding that since the material witnesses are either police officials or unknown foreign citizens, witness intimidation was also unlikely in the case.
The court rejected the prosecution’s argument that detention of the accused was necessary because the co-accused/owners of the call centre were still absconding.
“The alleged abscondence of other persons does not ipso facto (by that very fact) establish the culpability of the present accused nor does it justify their continued judicial custody,” the court said.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)