Lucknow: Police busted a sham call centre on Saturday and arrested seven people involved in cheating US citizens on the pretext of providing fake OTT subscriptions for $200, police said. The accused would lure citizens by telling them that the OTT platform has more than 8,000 Indian and US channels.
Acting on a tip-off, police raided the call centre in the Phase-1 area.
“The accused would contact US citizens and offer them subscriptions to an OTT platform called IP TV for $150 or $200. After the victims transferred the money, the accused would block them. When we raided the call centre, the accused were luring a US citizen,” said Dhruv Bhushan Dubey, the SHO of Phase 1 police station.
The operation had been running for the past three to four months.
Those arrested have been identified as Ashish Sharma (25), Vinesh Pal (30), Surmala (25), Gaurav Singh (23), Prakhar Mishra (22), Varepan Sachin Singh (28), and Swati (19). They have been booked under IPC Section 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) and the IT Act.
Police also seized nine computer units (CPUs, desktops, and keyboards), nine headphones, one laptop, and a wifi router.
