Hyderabad: Indian natives are cheating their fellow citizens by sitting in well-equipped and furnished call centers located in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Nepal.
Investigations into the Cybercrime units of Telangana police found the companies are heavily investing to set up the infrastructure required to lure and trap people from across the globe including India. The companies through dubious recruiters are hiring IT professionals to work at the scam centers and offer good pay for scamming people and meeting the targets.
Indians are preferred victims as they are familiar with the local languages and easily convince the people to make investments in crypto currencies or share markets.
“The companies are set up by the scammers in remote areas and by IT professionals from India and other countries are hired through dubious tricks. Their job is to scam people and collect crypto investments in currency form or money bank transfers,” said an official of Cybercrime.
With the companies becoming more professional and organized, the cases of investment fraud, crypto currency fraud, loan fraud are increasing in Telangana.
Companies collect the data of the local people through various sources and store it in their database. In instances the executives hack into the gadgets of the people and steal the data.
“Usually it happens when people give all permission while downloading any mobile based applications. The data gets automatically transferred into the servers of the scammers,” explained K V M Prasad, ACP Cyber Crime Hyderabad.
The scammers out of greed are setting up more companies and hiring professionals through dubious methods to work at their companies. The demand for Indian professionals is more as India with its vast rural population is embracing the social media platforms at a great speed and the mobile phone users are growing significantly.
Cases of the professionals who work at the call centers being trapped in view of huge demand are not less in the country. The fact the Indian government released an advisory in September asking job seekers to be more cautious while applying for jobs of ‘Digital Sales and Marketing Executives’ in Thailand is itself an indication to the dubious modus operandis adopted by the recruiters connected to scamming companies.
The issue stated, instances of rackets offering lucrative jobs for the posts of ‘Digital Sales and Marketing Executives’ in Thailand some IT firms involved in call-center scam and crypto currency fraud had come to notice recently by the Indian missions in Bangkok and Myanmar.
“Before travelling on tourist/visit visa for employment purposes, Indians are advised to verify credentials of foreign employers through the missions abroad, and antecedents of recruiting agents as well as any company before taking up any job offer,” said the advisory.
It further stated that the target groups are IT-skilled youths who are duped in the name of lucrative data entry jobs in Thailand through social media ads as well as by Dubai and India-based agents. The victims are illegally taken mostly to Myanmar and held captive to work under harsh conditions, said the government.
Many of the persons who were trapped by the companies and made to work in the companies narrated their ordeal to the government officials and shared details with the media houses as well. They complained of being given electric shocks if target was not met or sexually assaulted and videotaped by their employers.
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