The Cyber Crime Wing (CCW) of West Bengal Police on Wednesday said that it has busted a fake call centre in the Lake Town area of Kolkata and arrested 21 people, including four women.
In a statement, the police said that the fake call centre, which has been in operation since 2022, duped people in Australia by getting access to their bank account details.
Police also seized 29 computers, two laptops, 23 mobile phones, three pendrives, two routers, two switches, 24 ports, one hard disk, and Rs 26 lakh in cash from the fake call centre.
“The employees of the call centre used to call people in Australia posing themselves as employees of National Broadband Networks of Australia. The callers used to tell them that their network needs to be upgraded with an optical fibre connection and that they need to pay a certain amount. After getting convinced, Australian citizens used to share their bank credentials as well as their residential address to the callers for network upgradation service,” the police said.
According to the police, the call centre was being run by one Samir Khan, who had named his firm “Ostenix Solutions”.
“They used to call people in Australia posing themselves as employees of National Broadband Networks and offering them technical support. By fraudulent means, they used to get unauthorized remote access to their computers and ultimately cheated them.”
“In this crime, the owner of the Ostenix Solutions used Eye-Beam software which is a virtual mobile phone installed in each computer of this illegal call centre and this software was configured with foreign IP address to dial and receive calls from Australia and others. Thereafter, the owner used to input the leads ie the mobile number of Australian citizens in their software system those who have NBN connection in their country,” the police added.
Meanwhile, the CCW also arrested three persons from Chowhati in Sonarpur area of Baruipur who were allegedly cheating US citizens by posing themselves as employees of Microsoft. Police said they recovered Rs 26 lakh and identified transactions of around Rs 204 crore through cryptocurrency.