The Thane police in Bombay (Mumbai) on Friday (December 2) chargesheeted 80 people in the call centre scam in which callers from bogus call centres in the Mira Road area and Bhayandar duped US citizens by pretending to be calling from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The Thane police said they will also be charging 630 more who were working at these call centres. The police had arrested 80 people who were present at the call centres when they were raided on October 4. They have now decided to chargesheet the other 630 employees as well at a later stage. Over 20 persons including Sagar Thakkar alias Shaggy, the mastermind, and his sister Reema have been named as wanted accused.

The call centre scam was busted on October 4 when Thane police raided nine call centres where employees would make calls to US citizens posing to be from the IRS.

They would threaten the US citizen to instantly settle the tax default by making a payment to them.

The 80 arrested accused in the case are all still behind bars and the filing of the chargesheet will open up the option of securing bail for them. Among the accused who will be released on bail after two months is one who missed his exams as he was unable to secure bail and a woman who is to get married in the next few weeks.

DCP Parag Manere said, “Given the technical nature of the case, we got help from some top IT experts. With their help, we managed to get information from technology giants like Google and Magic Jack, a device used to make high quality VoIP calls from India to US.”

An officer linked to the case said the Magic Jack device used by the accused to make fraudulent calls had data of all the victims, who had been called. The police contacted Magic Jack company through ‘highly placed channels’ who gave them data from the device that helped police track down the accused persons.

The police then contacted Google to track how the accused had purchased the Magic Jack device. “The data from Google will help us prove the accused had purchased the device online. This device was then used to make the fraudulent calls,” the officer said.

Manere said the accused have been booked on charges of cheating, extortion and destruction of evidence that carries a maximum of seven years imprisonment. An officer said they added the destruction of evidence charge after they found that some hard disks at the call centre had been formatted days before they raided the place.

An officer said that in the form of evidence, they have CCTV footage from cameras at the call centres. In the footage, the accused are seen coming to the call centre where all fraudulent calls were made from. Apart from that, the police have recorded before a magistrate, statements of 10 persons associated with the working of the call centre. “The witnesses have given us detailed accounts of how the fraud was carried out. This will form strong evidence against the arrested accused during trial,” the officer said.

The police added that they will be filing at least another 3-4 chargesheets at a later stage. The police suspect that Ahmedabad was the hub of these call centres and those who were successfully operating these call centres there had then moved to the Mira Bhayander stretch. The US Justice Department on Thursday charged 61 persons in connection with the IRS scam including some US citizens.

  cyber crime, naked greed, scam