19 foreign nationals, 23 Indian agents held this year for passport fraud: Police
As per the data released by IGIA police, total 19 foreign nationals caught included 12 from Bangladesh, three each from Myanmar, Nepal and one from Afghanistan.
A team of the southern district of Delhi has busted a fake call centre with the arrest of nine accused, along with an equal number of female tele-callers, for allegedly duping people on the pretext of proving loans, said the Delhi Police on Tuesday.
Following the arrests, the police recovered 32 mobile phones, 48 fake SIM cards, four laptops, one dongle, 25 registers, ATM cards, passbooks and chequebooks of 23 bank accounts used to withdraw the ill-gotten money, two motorcycles and a car.
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Based on the information about the call centre being run in Lado Sarai village of Saket, when the team raided its premises it found no licence or legitimate authorisation mandatory to operate such a call centre, the police added.
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Subsequent inquiries revealed that the call centre personnel were engaged in making fraudulent phone calls to potential customers with an offer of loans under government schemes, the police said, adding they even developed a frontend website with government schemes bearing a logo.
The cheaters would ask their gullible customers to fill in their details on these websites and make a token online payment of Rs 100 as a processing fee. Furthermore, the tele-caller would ask his victim to share the message showing the amount deducted from their bank account to peep into the account balance.
They would then ask the prospective customer to retry. This time, instead of Rs 100, he would be asked to fill the amount available in his bank account, thus clearing their account of all the money he has, it added.
The accused would initially send an OTP for a nominal debit of Rs 100 so that the fraudsters could subsequently utilise additional OTPs for larger amounts.
After completing the process, when the customer demands the loan amount, they would evade his calls before blocking his number. Since they were using the SIM procured on fake IDs, they remained untraceable till their arrest, added the police officials.
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