A group of men has been arrested for allegedly running a fraudulent call centre at a residential apartment in Kasba, police said.
According to the police, the group used to target people staying abroad by posing as service providers of a software company.
“The fraudsters would call their potential victims posing as officials of a software company and fraudulently gain remote access to their devices on the pretext of giving them technology support,” said an officer of the anti-fraud section of the detective department of Kolkata Police.
Officers of the detective department said based on specific information, a police team had raided the apartment on the second floor of a building at 12, NDB Road in Tagore Park, Kasba, and arrested six men allegedly operating the fraudulent call centre.
The arrests were made early on Wednesday.
The police said five laptops, 10 mobile phones, four pen drives, a router, three headsets and some documents were seized from the apartment.
The cops identified the six as Subham Jaiswal, Shanawaz Ahmed, Zubair Alam, Soumen Pradhan, Raja Shaw and Srikant Munaswami. The men are from areas in Beniapukur and Topsia, investigators said.
Recently, several such cases have been detected where fraudulent call centres were found to be operating from inside flats within gated apartments.
A few weeks ago, another fake call centre was found operating from an apartment in Sonarpur where the accused men were targeting people located in the US and extorting money from them posing as officials of the US department of homeland security and allegedly threatening them saying evidence had emerged that Russians used their computers for suspicious activities.
The cybercrime wing of the state police busted the racket.
“Earlier these call centres used to operate from hired offices, then many of them shifted to standalone buildings. Now, the trend is the fraudsters are hiring apartments to run the call centres,” said an officer of Kolkata Police.