A married couple has been allegedly running a fake call centre and cheated at least 400 unsuspecting credit card holders over the last one year.
The police said that the fraudsters would transfer the money to their account with M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based money transfer service, launched by Vodafone.
The money would later be transferred to the bank accounts, which they had opened using fake identity and address proofs. Since M-Pesa has a transfer limit of Rs.5,000 per account per day, the racketeers overcame this hurdle by procuring dozens of activated Vodafone SIM cards through associates.
The arrested couple has been identified as Uma Bharti Kushwah and her husband Amar Prajapati.
Also arrested are the alleged kingpin Tej Bahadur and his associate Brajesh Narayan Shukla.
Interrogation of the arrested suspects has revealed that they had procured contact and bank details of victims through his associates employed at various private and nationalised banks. “Twenty three mobile phones, 177 SIM cards, four laptops and bank account-related data of more than 3,000 customers and other incriminating materials were recovered from the fake call centre,” said Mr. Yadav. The racket came to the police’s notice in January this year when an East Delhi resident approached Shakarpur police station to complain about being duped in this manner. The matter was taken up by the crime branch, which soon realised that it was a major racket.
