Navi Mumbai Police in Maharashtra have busted a fake call centre in the city that allegedly carried out cyber frauds amounting to at least Rs 12 crore, primarily targeting citizens in the United States, officials said on Thursday, reported the PTI.

Twenty people have been arrested in connection with the case, they said.

According to police officials, the overall scale of the operation is `extremely large`, with several key suspects still at large.

The call centre, run under the guise of multiple fictitious companies, had been operating in the Turbhe area of Navi Mumbai before being raided by a joint team from the Navi Mumbai Cyber Police Station and the Crime Branch, as per the PTI.

The police acted on a tip-off received on 18 November, which indicated that the establishment was defrauding people through various schemes. The subsequent raid exposed two principal methods of fraud.

In one, employees targeted US-based individuals via WhatsApp groups, enticing them with promises of high returns on stock market investments. In a separate scheme, American citizens were attacked through ransomware or other malware installed on their computers, the police said, according to the PTI.

The police officials described the operation as `massive in scale`.

A total of 97 people were found working at the premises, along with multiple WhatsApp numbers and bank accounts used in the fraudulent activities, they said.

Police examined transactions across 71 bank accounts sent to victims.

Sixty-one of these accounts showed transactions totalling Rs 12.29 crore. Checks against the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCCRP) revealed 31 cyber fraud complaints linked to the accounts.

Officers seized 108 computers, 38 mobile phones and five GSM servers. A case has been registered at the Thane Cyber Police Station under Sections 318(4) (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 319(2) (cheating by personation), and 61(2) (criminal conspiracy) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), along with relevant provisions of the Information Technology Act.

So far, 20 suspects have been remanded in police custody until November 23 by a local magistrate.

Police stated that the fraud amount is expected to rise as technical investigations progress.

(with PTI inputs)

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