Another Corruption/ Fraudulent story in India

India is home to most of the outsourcing services in the world with Indian BPOs providing voice and other customer related services to most MNCs based in the West. Some of the call centres are now becoming institutionalized fraud centres with their owners hiring people to defraud innocent people day in and day out. These call centre callers impersonate bank and government officials and try to get senetivie bank/credit card details from citizens. Even I have faced such as call in the past where the call centre guy/gal will brazenly ask you for details.

Only the very smart people can look through their game as these call centre people are trained on being confident about their impersonation. They are not scared even if you tell them that you will report them to the police. Given India’s slow moving judicaiary and pathetic and corrupt polices, these call centre owners know that almost nobody will complain and even if they do they can bribe and get away with it.

500 call centre employees in Mumbai were arrested for defrauding USA citizens by getting their details. They would threaten the citizens by impersonating as USA tax officials. The turnover of the call centre was nearly USD 150,000 from siphoning money from bank and credit card accounts. These 500 call centre employees would spend the whole day trying to dupe people. With a conversion ratio of 1-2% , they would make a tidy sum given that they would be calling thousands of people a day.

 In a major raid, over 500 employees of some call centres were detained for allegedly threatening the US citizens and siphoning off their money in Mira Road area here, police said today. The raid was carried out by over 200 police personnel, mostly from the Crime Branch, late last night and continued in the wee hours today, they said. They would call up the US citizens and demand their financial and bank details, failing which they would allegedly threaten them with dire consequences, including legal action.
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