How 3 Hyderabad cyber fraudsters operated fake call center to cheat US citizens

Cybercrime police busted a gang of cyber fraudsters who were running fake call centers to cheat foreign nationals through VOIP calls by impersonating executives of reputed antivirus companies.

Mohammad Rafi Kavungal, Gandham Veera Rama Naresh, Kanithi Kalyan Chakravarthy, from Hyderabad were previously engaged in Crypto trading. It was during this time that the trio happened to meet Sandeep Sharma of West Bengal.

Sandeep later introduced Rafi, Naresh, and Kalyan to three more West Bengal residents, Ryan alias Manish Gupta, Amarjeet Giri, and Mohd Imran.

Together they generated leads by pushing emails to US nationals. The trio from Hyderabad purchased a fake email database from websites on the darknet and sent bulk emails to U.S citizens mentioning a toll-free number. It was a VOIP number and service purchased from the darknet.

Hyderabad men created mail templates as per the requirement and send the emails. Mostly, the phishing emails were forwarded in the name of a reputed Anti-Virus company asking them to renew services.

What happened?

On receiving the emails, the U.S nationals contacted the number, which were answered by the tele-callers working under the West Bengal men in the call center set-up at Kolkata.

On receiving the calls from US citizens, the tele-callers convince them to take their paid services and pay the amount through a payment app (email-to-email money transfer), Gift cards, and bank accounts in Peru, the USA, Thailand, and Singapore.

Further, the gift cards were redeemed through telegram channels and money from the bank accounts were transferred through Bitcoins. West Bengal team looked after the payments made in Bitcoins and shared the booty among the Kolkata and Hyderabad teams.

How gang was busted?

On reliable information, K.Srinivas, Inspector of the Cybercrimes wing, and his team raided the illegal call center at Kolkatta and apprehended Mohammad Rafi Kavungal, Gandham Veera Ram Naresh, Kanithi Kalyan Chakravarthy.

They were registered with a reputed e-commerce company as sellers to project as their legal business. Simultaneously they were doing the illegal activity of sending bulk emails from fake ids to foreign nationals for generating leads (inbound calls) from those foreign nationals to the illegal call centers located in Kolkata (operated by Ryan alias Manish Gupta).

They were charging Rs.250 per call received and 25% commission on the transaction amount collected by the call centers by cheating foreign nationals.

There are various call centers run by Ryan alias Manish Gupta for generating inbound calls to his call centers. The suppliers send bulk emails, and bulk SMSs and run google Ad words. The recipients of such emails/SMSs especially foreign nationals call on the phone number mentioned in such emails and SMS. Ryan alias Manish Gupta and his team convinced the callers to purchase or renew the license for anti-virus software and make them pay for such service.

The accused were booked under section 419, 420, 468 r/w 34 IPC, 66 C & D IT Act, 2008 at Cyber Crime.