It isn’t just in Gurugram. There are thousands and thousands of call centers spread across India who, in the farce of “call center”, are partaking in illegal activities. Bengaluru, Kolkata, Indore, Mumbai—over the months and years, many such incidents have surfaced. The latest in line is, of course, Gurugram, which is a hotbed of call centers.
On Wednesday, the Police raided 8 call centers across the city and arrested 12 men. More such raids are expected to happen in the coming days. Although the amount of money these call centers scammed is not yet known, it is believed to span into hundreds of crores.
The primary targets of these call centers in Gurugram weren’t just the Americans. Aside from the USA, they also extorted money from people in UK, Australia, New Zealand,and Canada. How they scammed the people looks fairly simple really—no wonder, more and more youths, crediting themselves as “cyber expert”, are jumping in the circle to start their own call centers.
(Side note: If you’re pushing your kids to be “experts”, knowthat there are, apparently, different kinds of “experts”. So, above and beyond, focus on their moral values over expertise.)
Coming back to topic… here’s how call centers in Gurugram cheated people:
• First comes their own protection. So, they were using different emails and IP addresses of foreign countries to disguise themselves.
• Next, they need targets. The details of people living in different countries (from their emails to postal address), they purchased all that from the dark web.
• Now, they have to infect the victim’s device to make them believe something is wrong with their computer. They could do that in many ways; emailing them the virus, tempting them to go to some websites and make clicks.
• Once the victim opens such shady websites or emails, the virus gets transferred to their computer. Now note, it isn’t as much of a “virus” as just as just a very basic malware. The victims have their screen completely taken over and locked by a popup that read: “If not rectified immediately, the systems would be at risk of getting seriously damaged or hacked, which may, in turn, compromise personal and financial details.” A fake support helpline number also accompanies the message.
• Scared, the victim calls on that fake number for support. On the other side of the phone, sits the scammers disguised as technicians or representatives of Microsoft. In the name of technical support, they charged victims exuberant amount as service charge.
• The money eventually gets transferred to India through different Hawala channels.
That’s how the call centers in Gurugram cheated people.
Eventually, though, Microsoft got to know about the scam through the victims who spent hundreds and thousands as “service charge”. The experts in Microsoft conducted a probe and found out more about the large-scale scam, which was targeted Microsoft users across the world. They eventually managed to track back the IP address, phone number and various other identifications to Gurugram. They then filed a police complaint. Raids on 8 call centers in Gurugram followed. More are expected.
Again, I am fairly certain there are thousands of such bogus call centers across India, following similar models to cheat foreigners.
There’s a reason why call centers in India enjoy a bad repute around the world. (It isn’t just for the accent!)