July 11: Salt Lake police have arrested three directors of a Sector V call centre who had allegedly duped several British nationals posing as representatives of UK communications services provider BT and Microsoft.
The trio - Kush Kumar, 33, originally from Jamshedpur; Bhaskar Dutta, 29, a Habra resident; and Sumit Kumar Mishra, 27, of Baguiati - were picked up late last night.
An officer said the accused had duped their victims of more than Rs 2 crore.
Police said the call centre used to operate from the ground floor of Systron Building, opposite RDB Boulevard in Sector V.
The accused would allegedly call people in the UK posing as representatives of BT or Microsoft and tell them that their personal computers or smartphones had a bug.
They would also offer to get the gadgets repaired at a nominal fee.
Those who agreed to the offer were told to install a software, which would allow the accused to remote access the gadgets.
In order to win confidence of the intended victims, the accused would tell them to follow some steps that would show their computers or smartphones were performing below capacity.
"Once a machine has been remote-accessed, the caller would direct the victim to a payment gateway. After the victim would key in the debit or credit card details to make the payment, the men would black out the monitor and type a higher amount," said Santosh Pandey, deputy commissioner, headquarters, Bidhannagar commissionerate.
The accused would then disconnect the call. "The software they asked the victims to install made detection difficult," an officer said. "We raided the call centre based on a tip-off and arrested the three men."
Man in kidnap net
Police arrested a man in Dum Dum this morning on the charge of kidnapping a call centre employee from Salt Lake's AE Block on Monday night and demanding Rs 4 lakh in ransom from his friend.
Rajiv Kumar Jha's friend alerted the police who picked up Guddu Pandey, 29, when he turned up to collect the money.
Cops rescued Jha, 32, from outside a fuel pump in Dum Dum.
