Goregaon scam kingpin learned his tricks at Mira Road call centre

Yogi or Yogesh Sharma, the mastermind

The 25-year-old mastermind in the fake call centre racket busted in Goregaon last week, had honed his skills at the fake call centre at Mira Road that had been busted in October 2015 for duping US nationals out of $300 million. However, Yogi or Yogesh Sharma, a college dropout, had not been working at that call centre during the bust. At the Goregaon call centre, he and his team of nine, four of whom have been arrested along with him, had conned US citizens out of R1.5 crore in just 45 days.

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According to the police, the modus operandi was to call their victims through Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) and tell them the call was from the department of social security and that their number had come up in a case of fraudulent activity. They would then ask the scared Americans for cash or gift vouchers to popular online shopping sites as these were difficult to trace.

Pradipkumar Suresh Ram, the IT expert at the call centre

Sharma and his team were working in collusion with a team in the US who used to collect the cash from US citizens. Sharma, who has several years experience working in call centres, had bought the data of 1.5 lakh Americans and would call them through the software VICI Dialer. He had handpicked his team from among those who had previously worked in call centres that catered to American citizens. He ensured that their target would never be able to guess that the caller was not American. The questions asked, too, were carefully curated in order to ward off any suspicion that the caller was not genuine.

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Police sources said that they would pose as agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) and leave an IVRS message with a number to call back on. Once the victim called back, the accused would pose as an officer from the above government organisations.

Two of the other staffers arrested

The four other accused arrested in this racket have been identified as Naeem Shafi Khan, 31, Abhishek Salian, 31, Asif Rouf Lajekar, 32, and Pradipkumar Suresh Ram, 29. The roles of the others are yet to be determined, the police said. They had rented an office in Goregaon, and each employee was paid a monthly salary of R25,000 and the best closure employee was rewarded with R1 lakh extra.

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9
No. of people at the call centre

Rs 1 lakh
Bonus to employee if they bagged a victim

1.5 lakh
Size of the database of American citizens that the call centre was working with

From Transcripts

Call centre IVRS message:

This is officer xyz from the department of social security administration. The reason you have received this call from our department is to inform you that there is legal enforcement action filed on your social security number for fraudulent activities. When you get this message, kindly call back at the earliest possible on our number before we begin legal proceedings.