With the police considering the targeting of US nationals by a fake call centre in Bengaluru for “digital arrests” as an organised crime, the bail petitions of 19 people, including two directors from Rajasthan, who are accused in the scam exposed last month have been rejected by a sessions court in the city.
The Bengaluru police have added section 111 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which pertains to organised crime, to the charges of fraud and misuse of information technology in the case against Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd, which was registered last month following a tip-off about a fake call centre targeting US nationals for cyber fraud by threatening to “arrest them digitally”.
Following the addition of the strong charge of organised crime, which entails imprisonment of five years to a life sentence, a Bengaluru sessions court on November 7 rejected the anticipatory and regular bail pleas of the 19 accused people, including the firm’s directors, Mahipal Singh Bochalyo and Vikram Singh, hailing from Rajasthan. While Vikram Singh has been arrested, Mahipal is at large.
“As the security of the public and nation is involved and the alleged offences prima-facie fact of the economic stability of the nation and in case, if the petitioners are released on bail, there is every hurdle for fair investigation of the case and further, absconding of the petitioners to commit similar offences including the prima-facie organized crime, I deem it fit to hold that at this stage, no reasonable grounds exist for grant of anticipatory bail and regular bail,” the court said.
The basis on which the police have invoked the charge of organised crime under the BNS is the fact that one of the employees at the call centre who hails from Meghalaya has a previous chargesheet against him for an economic offence in Shillong.
Police sources said the organised crime charge was added on account of previous instances of fake call centre operators who target foreign nationals getting bail easily when only bailable charges under the IT Act and Indian Penal Code for cheating and fraud were added.
Victim statements crucial
The police are attempting to gather statements from victims in the US to substantiate the fake call centre case, as similar cases have failed in courts due to the lack of a victim or their statements to substantiate the police case.
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“The strong observations of the Supreme Court in a suo motu case regarding the growing number of ‘digital arrest’ cases where senior citizens are targeted are likely to help the prosecution of this case, where US nationals were targeted,” a police source said.
“Any person who is a member of an organised crime syndicate shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than five years but which may extend to imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to a fine which shall not be less than Rs 5 lakh,” the sessions court observed in its order.
The court has emphasised that the definition of organised crime under the BNS also includes economic offences and cyber crimes “by use of violence, threat of violence, intimidation, coercion or by any other unlawful means to obtain direct or indirect material benefit, including a financial benefit,” alongside crimes like murder, extortion, drug peddling, contract killing, land grabbing etc.
“Police have taken custody of some of the petitioners for the purpose of investigation in connection with the complaint averments of threat calls to the public as well as foreign nationals with regard to drugs trafficking/ money laundering etc by stating that they have been calling from US Security Force etc. and thereby digitally arrested them by putting demand for money to save them from such cases registered against them,” the court said.
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Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd, situated at HSR Layout, in Southeast Bengaluru, is a fake BPO company that employed 20-25 young boys and girls trained to cheat unknown victims by claiming to be law enforcement agents during interaction via internet calls.
Many of the people linked to Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd have claimed not to have played active roles in the perpetration of cybercrime. Among those whose bail pleas have been rejected are owners of buildings where the call centre was located and paying guest facilities where workers were housed, as well as food suppliers to the secretive PG facilities.
The two directors—Mahipal Singh, an engineering graduate from Rajasthan, and Vikram Singh, who was arrested recently—have claimed they were “not involved in the day-to-day administration of the company”.
Others have claimed that they “only worked as call centre employees and were never involved in any cyber fraud”. Two of the arrested accused are women from the Northeast.
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The police have alleged that one of the arrested people, Minot Khongkai from Meghalaya, has a chargesheet against him in Shillong for an organised crime linked to an economic offence.
Findings regarding the fake call centre
The fake call centre, Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd, which was allegedly targeting US and Canadian nationals with threats of “digital arrests” by cyber fraudsters, was established in Bengaluru in 2021 by Mahipal Singh and employed over 25 persons at multiple locations, investigations have found.
The filings of Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd with the Registrar of Companies in Bengaluru reveal that the firm started with a share capital of Rs 1 lakh—with 80 per cent invested by an investor, Vinay Kumar from Karnataka, and 20 per cent by Bochaliya—reported a loss of Rs 1,500 in 2022-23 and Rs 500 in 2023-24.
However, the Bengaluru police investigation has revealed that the firm paid salaries in the range of Rs 22,000 per month and cash incentives running into lakhs of rupees to telecallers who trapped Americans and Canadians into parting with funds with the threat of “digital arrest”.
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Following the arrest on October 6 and 7 of 16 people who were working at Cybits Solutions and staying at private paying guest facilities provided by the employers near the workplace, the police learned that the employees were being managed by a person identified by the workers as “Matt”—possibly a foreign national located abroad.
The employees at the fake call centre, who are from Gujarat, Mumbai, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal, have stated that they were recruited on the basis of job offers found on WorkIndia, LinkedIn, and other sites that advertised openings in BPO firms providing online services to the US, Canada, and other countries.
“The company managers had lured job seekers from various states by promising free accommodation and work opportunities in Bengaluru. They arranged houses in HSR Layout and BTM Layout, as well as cab and food facilities,” the police said in a statement on October 14.
After three weeks of telecaller training, employees were instructed to call customers in the US using fictitious names such as US Federal Investigation Service, US Postal Service Investigation Section, US Border Security Force, and US Customs and Border Protection Force, the police said.
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“Through a live server provided by the company, they would speak to victims, accuse them of being involved in criminal cases, show fake police IDs, and demand money in exchange for avoiding ‘arrest,” a police officer said. “The defrauded amounts were deposited into the company’s wallets or bank accounts.”
“They were doing a form of the digital arrests seen in India with the targets being foreign nationals,” said Seemanth Kumar Singh, Commissioner of Police, Bengaluru.
The probe has found that prepared scripts were given to the telecallers at the fake call center along with “multiple online calling tools and fake websites to contact US citizens, deceive them, and extort money”.
Police have seized 41 computer systems (41 monitors, 40 CPUs, and allied systems), two attendance registers, apart from the mobile phones of the workers.
Of the 16 arrested accused, eight have been identified as hailing from Maharashtra, four from Meghalaya, and one each from Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, and Gujarat.
Past cases of fake call centres targeting foreign nationals
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The finding of the fake call centre in Bengaluru targeting American citizens on October 7 by the city police was not the first such incident.
In 2022, the Bengaluru police received credible information of some people running an illegal fake call centre in the name of Ethical Infotech Pvt Ltd and Ethical Infocomm at two tech parks in Whitefield.
On July 7, 2022, the police raided the offices of the fake call centres and claimed to have found suspects making fraudulent calls to Americans by falsely claiming that orders had been placed by US citizens on Amazon and that the callers fraudulently collected bank details of the victims and deducted $500 from their accounts.
During the raid at two separate locations 127 desktops, 150 headphones, 10 internal hard discs, mobile phones, company ID cards, etc, were seized, and 35 people, mostly from Gujarat, were named as the main accused in the illegal operations.
The police said in 2022 that the “main kingpins belonging to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, were employing young graduates from various places in India, mainly Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Delhi”.
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Callers allegedly targeted mainly victims from the US and the modus operandi mainly involved sending text, voice, and email messages to potential targets that a fraudulent, suspect transaction or purchase is noticed in one of their accounts like a bank account or an Amazon account and that they were calling on behalf of the bank or Amazon to resolve the fraudulent transaction, the Whitefield police said.
They would finally zero in on the gullible victims who trust the callers and then pursue them till they part with their social security numbers and bank account details and siphon off money through various means such as untraceable money transfer apps like Amazon gift cards, cryptocurrencies, and even wire transfers, the police stated.
The fake call centre used software applications that allowed agents to target a large number of people from US databases it had, and the “callers and bankers” would engage susceptible victims and con them into parting with funds.
The operators of the two fake call centres busted in Bengaluru in 2022 had been identified as Rishi Vyas, Prateek Dudat, Parikh Biren, Heth Patel, Karan Laden, Syed Ibrat, Jithiya Kishan, Vihang Thakur, Vishal Parmar, Mithlesh Patel, and Raj Lalit Soni.
However, on March 20, 2023, the Karnataka High Court quashed the two cases registered by the Whitefield police regarding the fake call centre operations of Ethical Infotech and Ethical Infocomm on the grounds that there were no victims cited by the police for the two cases.
“The allegations against the accused in both cases are one and the same, and admittedly none of the statements of a victim was recorded to show these accused companies were involved in cheating any of the customers, and no customers or citizens of India or US have filed any complaint against the petitioner/company for having cheated any amount,” the court said.
The court also observed that the companies had not been arraigned as accused parties in the case while quashing the two FIRs filed by the Whitefield police in 2022 over the fake call centres.