A fake call centre in Bengaluru called Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd, which was targeting US and Canadian citizens with threats of “digital arrests” by cyber fraudsters, was established in Bengaluru in 2021 by a Rajasthan engineering graduate and a partner from Mandya and employed over 25 people at multiple locations, investigations have found.
Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd was exposed last week as a fake call centre targeting victims abroad by the Bengaluru police following a tip-off by a US agency leading to the arrests of 16 people, but investigations into the official company registered in Bengaluru have revealed a bogus trail of addresses of directors and company balance sheets for 2022-23 and 2023-2024.
The investigation by the Bengaluru police has revealed that Cybits Solutions Pvt Ltd, located at HSR Layout in Bengaluru, was started by Mahipal Singh Bochaliya, reportedly an engineering graduate from Rajasthan, and Vinay Kumar K M from Mandya in Karnataka for providing services in the information technology sector.
However, efforts by the Bengaluru police to track down the two people indicated as the founding directors of the firm have not yielded results yet, with a team sent to Jaipur to track down Bochaliya reporting that the address provided in Rajasthan was fake. The police are yet to trace Vinay Kumar, who is reported to be a resident of Bengaluru, sources said.
Bochaliya, however, has moved a Bengaluru court for anticipatory bail in the wake of the police raid on the office of Cybits Solutions on October 7 and the arrests of 16 employees.
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 Vinay Kumar and 20 per cent by Bochaliya—reported a loss of Rs 1,500 in 2022-23 and Rs 500 in 2023-24.
The Bengaluru police investigation has revealed that the firm employed over 25 people at multiple locations, paying 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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“The official records given to the registrar of companies may have been a facade to cover up the illegal operations of the company,” a police source said.
‘Employees managed by a foreign citizen’
Following the arrest of 16 people from different parts of India who were working at Cybits Solutions and staying at paying guest facilities provided by the employers near the workplace, the police have learnt that the employees were being managed by a person identified by the workers as “Matt”, possibly a foreign citizen located abroad.
The police have also found two more facilities in Bengaluru that had operated as fake call centres were vacated by the users after the raid on the Cybits centre at HSR Layout.
“The accused allegedly contacted US citizens by phone, falsely claiming that they were investigators or police officials from US law enforcement agencies. They would intimidate victims, alleging their involvement in drug trafficking or money laundering cases, and under the pretext of ‘helping’ them, would demand money online to “settle” the matter, thereby illegally obtaining large sums of money through cybercrime,” a police officer said earlier this week.
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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 BPOs 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 on Tuesday.
“After three weeks of telecaller training, employees were instructed to call customers in the US using phony US law enforcement names such as ‘US Federal Investigation Service,’ ‘US Postal Service Investigation Section,’ ‘US Border Security Force,’ ‘US Customs and Border Protection Force’, and other fake agencies,” the police officer said.
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”. The defrauded amounts were deposited into the company’s wallets or bank accounts, the police said.
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“They were doing a form of the digital arrests seen in India with the targets being foreign nationals,” said Seemant Kumar Sing, Commissioner of Police, Bengaluru.
The investigation has found that prepared scripts were given to the telecallers at the fake call centre along with “multiple online calling tools and fake websites to contact US citizens, deceive them, and extort money”.
The police have seized 41 computer systems and two attendance registers, apart from the mobiles 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.
Not the first case of Bengaluru fake call centre targeting Americans
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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 citizens of America 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.
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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”.
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.
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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.
FIRs quashed for want of victims
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.