Nineteen men and women who were allegedly running two call centres in the heart of the city’s business district — at Fairlie Place and on Netaji Subhas Road — have been arrested for allegedly duping people posing as representatives of a financial institution that offered personal loans on easy terms, police said.
The owner of the call centres, who the police identified as Rajib Singh, has also been arrested.
The 15 men and four women would allegedly call people at random offering loans at a very low rate of interest.
Once someone was persuaded to take the offer, he or she would be asked to pay anything between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 1.5 lakh as the “processing fee” for the loan, the police said.
Eventually, the people who paid the money neither got a refund nor a loan, they complained to the police.
“We raided the offices at 4 Fairlie Place and 14 NS Road on Thursday based on specific inputs and complaints of cheating by an organised racket and arrested the suspects,” said an officer in the detective department.
The police seized three CPUs, three monitors, 60 landline telephone sets, 18 mobile phones and a few registers.
A senior police officer said that when the people who had paid the “processing fee” would complain that they had not got the loan, the racketeers would further try to convince them to pay even more money for a larger loan.
“Unfortunately, many had fallen into this trap and had paid more than once without realising that they were being duped,” the officer said.
The 20 people who have been arrested have been booked under IPC sections on cheating, forgery, fraud and criminal conspiracy, and also under the Information Technology Act.
