Lucknow: A sham call centre that cheated people with offers of cheap personal loans from a private finance company was busted in Sector 62 with the arrest of eight persons. The call centre was running from house number C-4 in the area.
The gang, police said, was being led by a woman who had worked in the back-office of a private finance company and was responsible for reaching out to potential customers with loan offers. Apart from Chhaya Singh, the mastermind, the others who were arrested were Priya Shukla of Greater Noida, Anchal Choudhary from Hapur, Sulekha, Shivani and Ankit from Ghaziabad, Archana Prajapati of Noida and Vijendra Pratap Singh Chauhan, originally from Kannauj.
The raid at the call centre was carried out by a team from the Sector 63 police station and officers of the special task force from Lucknow. Among the documents and items seized from the office were 17 debit and credit cards, 35 phones, three laptops and data sheets with details of more than one lakh people.
So, how would the gang reach out to its targets? The fraudsters had fished out a database of potential customers looking for cheap personal loans on the internet. Youngsters with good command over the English language would reach out to these targets and offer them loans even if their documents were not in order.
The gang, however, would ask for money in the name of processing fee. It would normally range from Rs 4,000-5,000. “The money would be transferred via UPI or net banking. Once this payment was made, the accused would send their targets forged documents that showed their loan amounts had been approved and tell them it would take a couple of days for the money to reflect in their accounts. Once the victims realised they had been conned, the accused would switch off their phones and go incommunicado,” a senior officer said.
Chhaya Singh, according to the officer, started the gang in 2020 after leaving her job at the previous company. A software engineer working at the same firm would initially source the data of targets for her.
The gang is believed to have cheated around 300 people and pocketed more than a crore.
