Mumbai Crime: Call-centre racket selling Viagra to US citizens busted

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Mumbai Crime Branch on Sunday busted a racket in suburban Andheri that duped people in the US on the pretext of providing banned medicines to them. The racket involving nine people were arrested for cheating thousands of people in the United States, a police official said.

According to the police, the accused used Skype to talk to the US nationals. They posed as representatives of a pharmaceutical firm and offered to sell banned drugs like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra to them. Once the potential customers showed any interest in buying the medicines, the accused asked them to pay through online or buy some gift cards. They assured them of supplying those medicines but didn't.

However, even after the US nationals realised that they were duped, they didn't register any complaint against the frauds as their orders were of medicines that are banned in the country. This enabled the accused to take advantage of their predicament.

Police received a tip-off from the informers and conducted a raid on the call centre by a team headed by DCP Akbar Pathan. Nine 9 suspects, Owner Elvis Peter Nunes, 39, Technician Mohammad Irfan Madar, 25, and 7 other callers, were arrested and seized computers and hard disks.

A case has been registered against the frauds under IPC section 420 (cheating) and relevant sections of the Information Technology Act and further probe was on, he said.

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