CCB police bust fake online legal aid racket in Bengaluru; one arrested

Probe revealed that the accused Tufail has a brother in Dubai, who floated several companies to commit cybercrimes. Tufail claimed to provide legal services to cybercrime victims and cheat them of their money, police said.

Bengaluru: The Central Crime Branch (CCB) of the Bengaluru police have arrested a 37-year-old engineer for cheating victims of cybercrimes by offering them false legal aid online, officials said.

The arrested is Chota Ahammed Mubaraq alias Tufail, 37, originally from Tamil Nadu but has been residing at Kothanur in Bengaluru. Police said that Tufail was a BE graduate with a specialisation in Electronic Communication Engineering.

The probe first began in February this year after the Rammurthy Nagar police registered the case following a complaint by the victim, who lost Rs 12.5 lakh when he was looking for legal aid online after being conned out of Rs 1.5 crore by cybercriminals. The company he found online, Quickmoto Legal Service, was a fake one, run by Tufail, cops said.

The case was subsequently transferred to the cybercrime division of the crime branch. Investigations revealed that Quickmoto Legal Service had no physical location, and the address was only on paper. They, however, found India Legal Service, which was set up as a call centre in Bengaluru's Kasturi Nagar.

Further investigation revealed that Tufail, the mastermind, appointed 12 telecallers to talk to the victims of cybercrimes. They used Zoiper-5, a free application for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls – internet calls – to talk to the victims to mask their location from law enforcement.

“Probe revealed that Tufail has a brother in Dubai, who floated several companies to commit cybercrimes. Tufail claimed to provide legal services to cybercrime victims and cheat them of their money by taking service charges and legal charges, etc,” a police officer said.

During the search at the so-called call centre, the police recovered 10 hard disks, seven fake company seals, rental agreements, cheque books and other documents, one mobile phone, one CPU, 11 Vodafone SIM cards and an SIP trunk server to facilitate VoIP calls.

Police have established that the firm is involved in illegal transactions amounting to crores of rupees, and 29 cases have been registered against them in different parts of the country. “The probe is now expanded to trace and dismantle the larger syndicate,” an officer said.