MUMBAI: The city crime branch busted two call centers whose employees would pretend to be calling from Singapore and ask Indians to invest in international share trading.
The call centers would make calls through voice over internet protocol (VoIP) to unsuspecting investors.
Interestingly, all the call center employees would use pseudo names while talking to customers, said police.
Two persons, Aditya Maheshwari (40), Nepean Sea Road resident and Giriraj Damanani (39), Churchgate resident, have been arrested for running the call centers.
“We got information that fake call centers were functioning in Malad.
We raided two call centers.
At one place we found 40 employees while at the other call center there were 35 employees.
Most of them were busy making phone calls,” said inspector Vinayak Chavan, in-charge of crime branch’s Kandivali unit.
After an undercover informer alerted the police, Milind Bharambe, crime branch head, formed a team led by senior officers Veeresh Prabhu and Akbar Pathan to probe the matter.
“The accused pretended to be associated with 70trades.com and displayed their advertisements on the social media platforms telling ways to earn between Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,000 per day,” said an officer.
When a person clicked on the advertisement, it would ask the person to fill in details like name, contact number etc.
Soon, the person would get a call from a male / female caller from ‘Singapore’.
The caller, who mostly spoke in English, would at times speak in Hindi too to communicate with people.
They would convince the person to first invest 200 dollars in their company’s e-wallet and that they will later explain to the investor which companies they can invest in, added the officer.
The caller stated that once the payment is made by an investor, he / she would get a call within 24 to 48 hours from their team who would help them in investing in international share trading.
While some investors, who faced problems and tried contacting, they couldn’t since the caller had been using the VoIP method of calling.
While a withdrawal option was visible on the website, the investor couldn’t withdraw his / her investment.
“The accused had no permission from Sebi to collect investment.
The accused told us that they would get brokerage from 70trades.com for bringing customers who were interested in share business,” said the crime branch officer.
The accused had been running the call center since 2017, said police.
The accused, booked under the Telegraph Act and Information Technology Act, were produced before a court which remanded them in police custody till June 28.
Police said they were probing about the bank accounts and wallets too.