NOIDA: Six persons were arrested for allegedly running a fake call centre in Sector 2 and cheating scores of Americans and Canadians of money by first infecting their computers with virus and then offering to repair them.A police team raided the call centre, which was being run from a building in Sector 2, following a tip-off on Friday and arrested the six.The accused have been identified as Prabhat Sinha, Atul Verma, Vijay Sharma, Deepak Tiwari, Suresh Tiwari and Jahajeb Pasa — all from Noida and Delhi.“Prabhat and Atul set up the call centre at a building in Sector 2 and named it Code Mevan. Both had been working as directors of the company for the past six months. There were two other directors, who are now absconding. They have been identified as Vinod Nagori and Rohit Kothari, both from Ajmer in Rajasthan,” an officer said.Over the past one month, several fake call centres have been busted in Noida and the suburbs. The menace had assumed such alarming proportions even in foreign countries that a team from the FBI and Canada police had visited Noida and met SSP Ajay Pal Sharma to apprise him of the situation. The meeting had led to a series of raids and several fake call centres being busted.TOI had recently reported how lack of awareness, low rentals and a slack verification process had led to many illegal call centres coming up in Noida within a short span of time.Explaining the modus operandi of the Sector 2 call centre, SP (city) Sudha Singh said the accused would send pop-up messages to users in the US and Canada. When a user clicked on the message, his system automatically got infected with a virus and operations slowed down. In some cases, the computer would even get locked. The accused would then send another pop-up message, providing a telephone number of a technician who could help in unlocking or repairing the system.“This call centre infected computers of a number of people in the US, Canada and other foreign countries. They then asked the victims to pay anything between $99 and $600 (Rs 7,000-43,000) to unlock the computers or repair them, as the case may be. All the payments were made through an electronic gateway. We received information about this illegal call centre, conducted a raid and arrested six men from the spot,” Singh said.The officer said the electronic payment gateway through which the money was transferred had been opened by Prabhat Sinha. Police have found transactions worth several crores of rupees through the account. “We have also found data related to more than 500 people, such as their phone numbers and user IDs,” he said.The police that raided the building also recovered seven laptops, one VOIP calling device and two chequebooks. A case has been registered against the six under Section 420 (cheating) of the IPC and several provisions of the IT Act.

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