The Kolkata Police Detective Department (DD) arrested seven persons running a crypto fraud racket from a Behala address.

A raid was carried out by the sleuths on the wee hours of Wednesday at the first floor of a building on 88/4 Rai Bahadur Road.

The accused were running a racket via Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) calls to US residents posing as employees of the online payment system – PayPal.

The arrested were posing as PayPal employees (Our Correspondent)

The calls were made to the PayPal users in the US, who were told fraudulent transitions were made from their crypto wallets. They would assure the unsuspecting users that to solve the issue they needed to share a One Time Password (OTP).

Once the users shared the OTP the perpetrators took control over their bank accounts by remote desktop applications as a means to siphon off their money.

During the raid, DD sleuths found 13 mobile phones of different makes, three laptops and one wifi router.

The seven persons arrested were identified as Ritick Singh, Gobind Rajbhar and Sujan Singha from Behala, Sohail Rayaz from Golf Green, Debasish Roy from Picnic Garden, Akash Shaw from Parnashree and Ritesh Raj from Siwan, Bihar.

Seven persons were arrested for cyber fraud (Our Correspondent)

The cops are still in the dark on the volume of money that the gang had siphoned off and the number of victims.

“A case will be started under the Information Technology Act, 2000 as the concerned accused persons have committed an offence against the genuine customers in the US by impersonating themselves as the employees of the payment gateway company,” the officer said