A married couple and their two accomplices have been arrested for allegedly running a fake call centre and cheating customers of various banks through M-Pesa, a mobile-based money financing and micro-financing service provided by Vodafone, police said on Saturday.

The accused used to siphon off money upto Rs 5,000 from customers’ account after tricking them into disclosing details of their credit cards by saying that they had earned reward points against their previous transactions.

They used to swindle customers by claiming that the reward points would be credited in cash in their accounts.

Modus operandi
The gang, using the unique modus operandi, duped more than 400 people across the country in less than a year.

Those arrested have been identified as Tej Bahadur, kingpin of the racket, Uma Bharti Kushwah, her husband Amar Prajapati, and Brajesh Narayan Shukla.

“The bank account related data of more than 3,000 customers and other incriminating materials were recovered from the fake call centre during a raid on May 9,” said Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Yadav.

Interrogation of Tej Bahadur revealed that he procured bank details of customers from his associates employed at various private and nationalised banks. About the recovery of SIM cards in bulk, Yadav said that all of them were activated SIM cards of Vodafone which Bahadur used to procure from Shukla.

“Since M-Pesa allows transaction of only upto Rs 5,000 per day on each account, the gang had been using the activated SIM cards for maximum money transfers every day,” he said.

Besides assisting Bahadur in the entire fraud of duping people, the married couple was working as tele-callers at the call centre.

They had appointed over a dozen female tele-callers on payroll whose job was to allure the customers and obtaining details of their credit cards.