Kanpur: In a major breakthrough, four people were arrested for running a fake international call center in Kakadev and duping 12,000 US citizens of at least $9 lakh (Rs 67 crore) by hacking their data on Wednesday. Gang leader is a software engineer with a degree Pune University and are experts in mobile hacking. Police raided the gang’s call center and found several phones, computer hard disks and ATM leaves.
“The fraudsters were duping people in the US into dollars by hacking their mobile phones through the call centre. The mastermind Munendra Sharma is a software engineer from Pune University, and Noida resident Sanjeev, Firozabad resident Sanjeev, Pratapgarh native Jikarulla and Bihar resident Suraj Suman are others,” said police commissioner Asim Arun.
Police have recovered 27 hard disks, six ATM cards of different banks, passport, Aadhar card, driving license, five Android phones, American Express Bank debit card, two. pan leaves, Hotel Taj Membership card from their possession, an official said.
“As soon as US citizens click on blinking ads on any site, such as to lose fat, reduce belly, strengthen knees, increase height or stop hair fall, a malware will be uploaded to their mobile. Pop-up messages will appear on the screen again and again, causing inconvenience to the mobile user. A helpline number would come up with annoying pop ups and as soon as the victim called the number, the gang would ask for a fee in dollars to clean up the virus and render their service. The user would transfer money to the specified account, after which he was asked to download some app for technical support. As soon as the user downloaded the app, the phone got hacked.
This plan was sold by the call center in the name of removing malware and providing service for six months to a year. If no service was provided, they promised to refund the amount. When a user asked for money back saying that the service was not good, he became a victim of fraud. Since the caller’s mobile was already hacked, gangsters used to change the coding of account details in HTML on remote access.
After this, they used to send fake messages of online transactions on the user’s phone. In this message the amount was shown to be many times more than the amount to be refunded, while in reality no amount was transferred. At the same time, the user felt he had been refunded more, police said.
In addition, they will then deduct the service charge.
In this way the gang had cheated thousands of crores.
“The fraudsters were duping people in the US into dollars by hacking their mobile phones through the call centre. The mastermind Munendra Sharma is a software engineer from Pune University, and Noida resident Sanjeev, Firozabad resident Sanjeev, Pratapgarh native Jikarulla and Bihar resident Suraj Suman are others,” said police commissioner Asim Arun.
Police have recovered 27 hard disks, six ATM cards of different banks, passport, Aadhar card, driving license, five Android phones, American Express Bank debit card, two. pan leaves, Hotel Taj Membership card from their possession, an official said.
“As soon as US citizens click on blinking ads on any site, such as to lose fat, reduce belly, strengthen knees, increase height or stop hair fall, a malware will be uploaded to their mobile. Pop-up messages will appear on the screen again and again, causing inconvenience to the mobile user. A helpline number would come up with annoying pop ups and as soon as the victim called the number, the gang would ask for a fee in dollars to clean up the virus and render their service. The user would transfer money to the specified account, after which he was asked to download some app for technical support. As soon as the user downloaded the app, the phone got hacked.
This plan was sold by the call center in the name of removing malware and providing service for six months to a year. If no service was provided, they promised to refund the amount. When a user asked for money back saying that the service was not good, he became a victim of fraud. Since the caller’s mobile was already hacked, gangsters used to change the coding of account details in HTML on remote access.
After this, they used to send fake messages of online transactions on the user’s phone. In this message the amount was shown to be many times more than the amount to be refunded, while in reality no amount was transferred. At the same time, the user felt he had been refunded more, police said.
In addition, they will then deduct the service charge.
In this way the gang had cheated thousands of crores.
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