Pune: Lonavla city police have registered a case against 20 people for allegedly operating an illegal call centre from a rented bungalow in a housing society at Nangargaon and cheating foreign nationals by impersonating representatives of reputable companies.A police team led by inspectors Mahesh Vidhate and Pramod Kshirsagar raided the bungalow in the early hours of Wednesday. The operation began around 4am and continued till 6pm. The police seized laptops, mobile phones and cash collectively worth Rs36.41 lakh from the bungalow.All the 20 arrested people were produced before a court and remanded in police custody for seven days.Inspector Vidhate said the accused used laptops and mobile apps to contact people in foreign countries, including the US and Canada. He added that all the arrested accused were from Mumbai and had been operating the illegal call centre from a rented bungalow. “We are investigating how long they had been operating from the bungalow. We have traced the owner of the bungalow,” he said.“They posed as representatives of companies, including Amazon and Google, and used fake documents and identities to gain the victims’ trust and obtain their personal and banking information,” Vidhate said.He said the accused used the information obtained from the victims to prepare forged bank-related documents. They then threatened the victims by claiming that parcels they had ordered contained narcotic substances and extorted money from them. “We received a tip-off that some people were running an illegal call centre from a bungalow in the area, so we raided it. We found several people working on laptops and mobile phones, wearing headphones and communicating in English. We took them into custody. During questioning, they admitted to operating a call centre but could not produce the required permission,” Vidhate said.The officer said the accused extorted money from foreign nationals and converted the foreign currency into Indian rupees either through cryptocurrency or hawala transactions. The case has been registered under relevant provisions of the Indian Telegraph Act, the Information Technology Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including sections relating to cheating, impersonation, forgery, extortion and criminal conspiracy.
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