Call centre scam: 109 US citizens swamp cops with complaints

Two days after the Thane police busted a major scam wherein call centres were allegedly duping US nationals of thousands of crores of rupees for the past one year, thousands of US citizens are now flooding the law enforcers with phone calls complaining about being cheated in a similar manner.

So, far the Thane police control room has received calls from 109 US nationals complaining about being victims of call centre fraud. The police has asked all these victims to send their complaint with all the relevant details via e-mail to the Thane police’s official mail id.

Meanwhile, a team of Thane police on Saturday raided four different call centres in Kashimira area; however, the police team found these locked and deserted.

According to Thane police officials, a separate line with a police officer has been dedicated to attend the phone calls of US citizens.

On Tuesday, the Thane police arrested 70 employees of a call centre for allegedly cheating and robbing US nationals posing as officials from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) department.

Thane assistant police commissioner Bharat Shelke said, “From Wednesday night onwards, our control room numbers started getting phone calls from the US nationals. So we have dedicated a separate line to attend to these phone calls, as there has been a deluge of them. Every phone call congratulated the Thane police for nabbing the accused in the scam.”

“We have received 109 calls from US citizens. Most of them were from Los Angeles. We have asked them to submit an elaborately written complaint to CP.thane@mahapolice.com. We have made available the facility to give a complaint online on our website,” said an official from the control room.

Meanwhile, the Thane Commissioner of Police Parambir Singh has interrogated all the 70 accused in this case on Friday from 3 pm to 8 pm. “As it is an international racked, with so many people involved, quite a few accused were interrogated by the commissioner himself,” said a source.

Senior officials also confirmed that the Thane police had received a CD of the call which had been recorded. The police found that even as an employee was threatening a senior citizen based in US, she suffered from a stroke attack. Officials are looking for more details so that they can add stringent charges under section 304 of the Indian Penal Code against the accused.