A group of 26 men and women involved in running a call centre in Salt Lake’s Sector V were arrested on Monday evening on the charge of blackmailing people.
The employees would target those who opted to get loans through a mobile loan app developed in Bangalore.
Officers of Bidhannagar police said the employees of the call centre would first gain access to the personal details of the loan applicant — their contact details and images in their photo gallery — and then they would allegedly morph the photographs with pornographic images to blackmail them.
More than two dozen people have been cheated through this call centre, the police said.
The call centre is located on the fifth floor of a building named Sugam Business Park in Sector V.
“Till now we have come across fraudulent call centres that had been cheating people in the garb of being representatives of e-commerce giants or officials of banks.
This is a new where the victims are being trapped by loan offers and then their photographs are being morphed to blackmail them,” said Biswajit Ghosh, deputy commissioner (detective department), Bidhannagar police commissionerate.
“The trap is set at the time the app is downloaded. The app demands permission to access the user’s contacts, photo gallery and location, without which one won’t be able to download the app,” said Ghosh.
“Initially, the applicants got the money. But after a few days, the fraudsters started demanding more as a processing fee. If the applicant refused to pay, his photographs were morphed and sent to one or two of the people on his phone’s contact list,” Ghosh added.
Out of the 26 persons arrested, some can speak multiple regional languages, an officer said.
