CBI busts fake call centre targeting US citizens, recovers Rs 3 cr, gadgets

The Central Bureau of Investigation conducted searches in Delhi and the national capital region (NCR) and busted a fake tech-support call centre that allegedly defrauded US citizens online.

The CBI recovered gadgets, foreign currencies and more than Rs 3 crore during the searches at four locations in Delhi-NCR in, officials said on Thursday.

They said the case is related to a CBI FIR registered on June 10 last year against Harish Kumar, Amit Kumar, Rakesh Kumar Athotra and Raj Kumari for allegedly cheating US citizens by taking controls of their computers in the garb of tech support.

"They were allegedly receiving leads from their source and on these leads they would call potential targets in the USA via Textnow application and take control of their systems using remote access software like Any Desk on the pretext of solving issues," the spokesperson said.

The CBI was helped by US probe agencies and they found that the four were running a mobile call centre in which they used to move from one place to another.

The accused would take laptops on rent and deleted everything from the hard disk before returning it to the company.

The agency carried out the searches at the premises of the accused and recovered foreign currencies and around Rs 3,09,64,100, they said.

Besides the cash, the CBI recovered gadgets including 15 mobile phones and seven laptops containing remote access application, Textnow apps, fake international calling numbers, incriminating documents pertaining to US nationals, crypto investments, chats containing details of the alleged fraud and scripts for talking to US citizens, an official statement said.

During the searches, a fake tech support call centre was found where the accused/other persons were allegedly involved in online cheating of US citizens impersonating the tech support executives, it said.

It was further alleged that they would then guide the targets to buy a gift card for installing/ upgrading the security software (which was never actually done) and take the card number from them.

The CBI said the gift card numbers taken from the targets were sent to an exclusive telegram group for cash redemption through hawala channels.