PNS|Hyderabad
Madhapur police nabbed an inter-state cyber fraudster gang of 115 members for targeting and cheating US citizens through VOIP calls and impersonating a US Customs and Border Protection cell department on Friday.
The accused are Md Ansari Mohirfan (A1) from ARJ Solutions, Ghanchi Akib (A2) from AG Solutions, Pradeep Vinod Rathod (A3), Osman Ghani Khan (A4), Shivam Pradhan (A5) and Deepu Thapar from Vertez solutions.
According to the police, the accused ran a business and collected personal data from callcentersindia.com which is a Leads Generation portal. They make calls using the VOIP calling service provider VC Dial to the US citizens posing as US Customs and Border Protection cell department.
They also threaten them by saying that they have received a parcel in the victim’s name, containing suspicious substances and will raise legal action against them. They also force them to purchase gift cards or vouchers from Amazon or Apple company at supermarkets so as to cancel or return the said parcel.
The victims (US citizens) purchase the gift vouchers and inform the call centre employees. The accused asked them to give redeem code of the gift cards and later sell them at discounted rates on the PAXFUL website.
When the code is redeemed, the purchasers from Paxful send money to fraudsters in the form of cryptocurrency. Following, the accused converts that cryptocurrency into USDT (Stablecoin) by using wallets on the cryptocurrency exchange platform called TRUST.
Then they search for the crypto purchasers on local bitcoin vendors’ websites who are willing to purchase crypto while making payments in cash or through IMPS and UPI transactions. On finalising vendors, they transfer USDT to those vendor’s wallets which need not be registered on the Trust platform.
Then the vendors make payments in cash through unknown people at different locations. This way, the accused convert cryptocurrency into INR.
