Fake Microsoft employee gang duping US nationals through pop-ups on computer screens busted: Police

Gurugram: The Gurugram police on Wednesday arrested 14 people, including three women, busting a gang of fake Microsoft employees involved in duping US nationals by sending pop-ups on their computer screens, offering various technical support.

The police made the arrests in an early morning raid at the racketeers’ fake call centre in the South City-1, Sector 51 and also seized 14 laptops, nine mobile phones and over Rs 1.10 lakh in cash.

Set up in March this year jointly by five partners, the call centre used to send pop-ups on users’ computer screens offering them technical support, hardware upgrades, antivirus etc while posing as Microsoft employees, police said.

Following the search, seizure and arrests, the police lodged an FIR at Sector 40 police station under various sections of the IPC and IT Act.

The police raided the fake call centre on a tip-off to Inspector Samer Singh of the Cybercrime police station.

The arrested people included the four call centre partners Karan Sharma, Mayank Nath, Rahul Bhati and Mohit Bajaj, police said adding that the fifth partner, Rajat Juneja was out of the city when the raid was conducted.

Police identified other accused as Nikita, Simran, Ankit Singh, Rahul, Mukesh, Lovish Sehgal, Priyal, Abhishek, Vishwas, and Gurpreet Chawla, all Delhi residents.

Revealing their modus operandi to the police, one of the arrested accused Karan Sharma said, “We would send pop-ups to computer systems in the US through call vendor Jordan who charges Rs 1,500 per call.” “The call was transferred by Jordan through the X-LITE dialer. Our employees then used to receive calls and talk to foreigners posing as Microsoft employees and offer to fix their problem through remote access like team viewer, any desk or ultra viewer and ask them to pay USD500 to USD1500 dollars through gift cards for our services,” he said.

"The accused trapped foreigners to clear pop-ups and provide antivirus in the name of technical help. They would ask US nationals to purchase I-tune gift cards and then would take their numbers and redeem them,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) Virender Vij said.