Engineer held for running fake call centre

New Delhi: A network of fake call centres and limited companies has been unearthed with more than 1,000 insurance policy holders were cheated on the pretext of bonus on matured policies. The police has arrested three persons, including an engineering graduate, on Friday.

The accused cheats were involved in using stolen data of prominent insurance operators, opened call centres with large number of employees and several phone lines to lure policy holders from all over the country, said Vijay Kumar, DCP (West).

The police has so far identified 361 victims of the racket, spread across the countries including in the cities like Bengaluru, Neemuch, Delhi, Surat, Greater Noida, Vadodara, Mumbai, Sahabad, Guwahati, Valsad, Goa and Lucknow. They cheated their victims to the tune of Rs 2.23 crore through 2391 transactions in different accounts, said the officer.

The illegal activities of the racket were exposed when a case of cheating was registered on the complaint of a deputy director of Ministry of Skill development at Kirti Nagar police station, on June 15. The complainant’s wife had an insurance policy and they were contacted by call centre run by the accused resulting in a cheating of Rs 2.07 lakh on the pretext of bonus.

During investigation, the police traced the numbers used to call the complaints and addresses of the holders of accounts in which money was deposited in five instalments, he said.

In November, several raids were conducted in Delhi and NCR in November and the CA who had got the suspected company of the accused registered was questioned.

“Finally, the police managed to trace the addresses of the accused Om Parkash Ray, 28 and Manish Roy, 22, from Mangal Bazar in Uttam Nagar where they had established a new call centre,” the officer said. Accused Om Prakash was the mastermind of the racket while Manish, who has a BTech degree in Mechanical engineering, was his cousin, he said.

Another accused, Ankit Raheja, who allegedly supplied data of policy holders to the accused, was arrested from Noida.

From Raheja, MIS database of around 1 crore policies of different insurance companies have been recovered and further raids were conducted to nab other data suppliers, he said. Further investigation in the case is underway, he added.