yber crime team of the Gurugram police busted an illegal call centre operating at Plot No 270 Udyog Vihar Phase-2 in Gurugram on Wednesday.

The call centre mostly used to cheat US nationals on the pretext of technical support by creating a fake website of an accounting company, police said on Thursday.

According to the police, a team of the cyber crime police station led by ACP (cybercrime) Priyanshu Diwan raided the call centre following a tip-off.

During the raid, the police arrested 18 people, including 8 women and the call centre operator, in connection with the matter and seized 17 CPUs along with other electronic gadgets.

The arrested accused have been identified as Gaurav Bakshi, Debashish Chatterjee, Anmol, Kanishk, Ajeesh Mathew, Kunal, Devender Devgan, Hitesh Malik, Rohit Singh, Aryaman Thakur, Nidhi, Sita, Muskan Rajput, Bhavana, Shivani, Lahinganhat Haikip Sharon and Nagmathingcho.

The police team registered a case against the accused under sections 318 (4), 319 BNS and IT Act in Police Station Cyber Crime South, Gurugram and arrested the accused as per the rules in the case.

During interrogation, it was found that the accused, Gaurav Bakshi, is the operator of this call centre, and he runs this call centre along with his companions at the behest of his other partner.

Bakshi used to get a salary of about Rs 1.5 lakh and his other employees used to get a salary of about Rs 30,000 per month.

"We received specific inputs that a fake call centre had cheated several US nationals on the pretext of technical support. The youths were employed at the call centre, which was being operated without a license issued by the Department of Telecommunications (DOT)," said Priyanshu Diwan, ACP (Cyber Crime).

The accused was allegedly running this illegal call centre with his fellow accused since February 2024. The accused were cheating foreign nationals in the name of providing customer care service of Software Support/Accounting Support. The accused used to run ads on Google from the customer care helpline number of a famous company. When foreign nationals call on the toll-free number, the call comes to their call centre through VCL Dialer, 3CX Dialer.

"The accused introduced themselves as representatives of a famous company and got remote access to the computer system of foreign nationals by getting them to download screen-sharing applications in their system. In the name of solving their problem, they used to get 200-1000 dollars from them through a payment gateway. The accused used to commit the fraud by creating a phishing website of an accounting company named Quick Books," Diwan added.

"The matter is under investigation. How the accused was operating the fake call centre is part of an investigation. The involvement of other people cannot be ruled out. The culprits are on police remand for further questioning," the officer said.

An FIR under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the IT Act has been registered at the Cyber Crime South police station..