CBI busts 2 illegal call centres, arrests 6 for scamming Japanese citizens

The accused have allegedly defrauded Japanese citizens by impersonating as technical support personnel from multinational corporations like Microsoft and coerced them into transferring funds into mule accounts.

New Delhi: Speaking in 'unnatural and non-fluent' Japanese and conversations in Hindi heard in the background during scam calls have led the CBI to unravel two illegal call centers engaged in a sophisticated transnational tech support fraud targeting Japanese citizens and arrest six men hailing from Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

The accused have allegedly defrauded Japanese citizens by impersonating as technical support personnel from multinational corporations like Microsoft and making them believe that their electronic devices were compromised to coerce them into transferring funds into mule accounts.

In a statement on Thursday, the CBI said it has conducted searches in 19 locations on Wednesday and arrested six persons -- Ashu Singh from Delhi, Kapil Ghakhar from Panipat, Rohit Maurya from Ayodhya and Shubham Jaiswal, Vivek Raj and Adarsh Kumar from Varanasi.

The arrests came as CBI worked closely with the Japan National Police Agency and Microsoft to identify the syndicate members and their locations.

According to the FIR registered on may 16, the accused allegedly displayed fake virus alerts and phishing prompts on the computer screens of unsuspecting users and induced fear by falsely claiming that the victims' systems were infected and instructing them to call a specified phone number.

Once contact is established, the accused convinces the victims to install remote access tools, thereby gaining control over their computers and sensitive financial information.

The FIR mentions four instances from April 2024 to July 2024 in which money was defrauded from Japanese citizens. The location of the suspects were identified to India after it was known that the "Japanese language used by the callers are notably unnatural and non-fluent. Additionally, background conversations in Hindi were audible during calls, and incoming calls from the fraudsters showed Indian country codes".

Armed with information about the key actors in the scam and links of as many as 94 malicious URLs to four Indian IP addresses that were used to create Japanese-language pop-ups, the CBI conducted searches at various locations.

"The syndicate operated call centres designed to appear as legitimate customer service centres, through which victims were deceived into believing that their electronic devices were compromised," the CBI statement said.

The searches resulted in the seizure of a trove of digital evidence, devices and documents "indicative of the large-scale operations of the syndicate." Preliminary analysis confirms that the scam leveraged advanced social engineering techniques and technical subterfuge to manipulate victims and extract money under false pretences, it said.