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New Delhi, India, June 30, 2023 - Aamir Khan (22) works at a call centre, earns a salary that is in five figures, and spends his time dialling numbers from a list provided to him by his team leader, talking to clients and customers, convincing them, like call centre agents sometimes do, to click a link to close the deal.

Neither Khan nor his work is unique in the city that is India’s call centre capital.

Only, Khan’s office is like no other call centre’s, although it does have a view.

Khan sits on a hillock in the Aravalli range in Nuh, 98km from Gurugram (there are others like him on the same hillock and on surrounding ones) making calls to prospective "clients" and instead of a "team leader" listening to their calls for "quality purposes", there is a handler who sits somewhere close by.

The handlers or team leaders have three roles: they assign work to the callers on their teams (usually by the nature of fraud); keep track of the money involved; and step in to handle glitches.

Khan is a cog at the core of what has emerged Nuh’s major industry, cyber frauds, with police estimating that there are around 500 groups, each of up to 10 people, who are involved in the racket. Nuh is the heart of a countrywide racket that targets people who transact business (of any sort) online -- and these days that includes just about anybody. Here, school dropouts sweet talk people into clicking on links.

On the day HT meets Khan, he is an Indian Army officer who is targeting a man who has put his car up for sale on a shopping site. Khan, who usually speaks in the Meo dialect, is speaking perfectly pronounced Hindi words, and peppering the conversation with some English words to make the script as convincing as it gets.

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"Namaskar sir mai Rajesh Kumar bol raha hun. Main Indian Army me kaam karta hun aur Srinagar mein posted hun (Hello sir, I am Rajesh Kumar. I am in the Indian Army, posted in Srinagar). Maine apka advertisement dekha, mai yeh car lena chahta hun (I saw your ad on OLX. I want to buy your car. I will immediately pay the amount). Mai aapko link bhej raha hun, aap click karoge to aapko payment receive ho jaygi. Pahle ek chhota amount transfer hoga taki aap check kar sako, phir full payment bhejunga (I am sending you a link, please click on it to first receive a token amount. Once you are assured, I will send another link for the full payment of ?50,000).

The first link is clicked, and a token amount of ?5 is received by the "target". Then, another link is sent, which is again clicked immediately, but this time the person on the other end loses ?50,000 from his account. This is the most basic of all frauds -- but it works. By the time, the target realises that he has been duped, Khan has switched off his phone, picked up another one with a different SIM, and is on to his next call, his next target.

Khan is the spear-end of an operation that believes in specialisation; there are people whose job is to secure SIM cards; others who get phones; and still others who get financial and personal data of potential marks. And there are those that manage the operation’s own finances, using UPI, moving money across accounts.

Cyber fraud is a full-time six-hours-a-day job for thousands of fraudsters who operate from 14 villages in Nuh, whose police department in February launched a crackdown in 40 villages after analysing data that pointed to at least 14,000 suspicious mobile phone numbers active around these villages and in the Aravalli forests. The police said the department of telecommunications of DoT has since helped deactivate these.

But the 14,000 number worried the police. Varun Singla, superintendent of police, Nuh, said that they started identifying bank accounts linked to these numbers and have found that at least 30,000 bank accounts are being used to transfer money after fleecing victims.

The highest number of cybercrimes in the country over the last three years originated from Bharatpur district in Rajasthan, showed data obtained from the Union home ministry. The numbers indicate that the Mewat region, comprising Bharatpur and Alwar in Rajasthan, Mathura district in UP and Nuh in Haryana, has replaced Jamtara in Jharkhand as India’s newest hub for cybercriminals.

Police said the villages where a majority of cyber fraud cases originated were Nai (where Khan is based), Tirwara , Bicchor, Singar, Jaimat, Gangadbas, Piproli, Khedla, Lohingakalan, Jakhopur, Aminabad, Bisru, Dudholi, and Tuseni. There are 434 villages in the district, police said. Most of the villages are located in the foothills of the Aravallis and serve as perfect spots to make fraudulent calls from, police added.

The police said several cons use cellphone apps to create fake emails to appear as if they were sent by telecom providers, banks or social media sites. Once a user clicks on a link provided in the email, they are then drawn in to the fraud.

The training and the trainers

Rajasthan’s Kota, popular for its hundreds of coaching centres that train thousands of students every year to take engineering and medical examinations, is less than 100km from Nuh. Here hundreds of boys and young men, some as young as 14, but none older than 30, are trained in cyber fraud. The interesting thing is that few of them are untrained garden-variety frauds; most are well trained professionals who learn the ropes from the best in the business — for a fee, of course.

Training and trainers are at the core of the racket. HT’s reporting indicates that trainees typically pay between ?25,000 and ?1 lakh for the training. The trainers don’t use smartboards or PPT presentations; they use printouts and a normal blackboard to teach skills. How to identify a mark? How to make a call? What to say? How to earn the target’s trust? How to make them click on the link? Some training programmes are rough-and-ready and last just a day; others go on for a month.

It’s serious business. A trained con artist such as Khan could make 45,000 a day.

Ummar Mohammad (23) claims to have duped at least 500 people in the past year, mostly businessmen wanting to sell something. He poses as an Indian Army officer. He said this is one of the easiest ways to dupe people as they trust the Indian Army. "I have never been to school; my brothers have been in this trade for several years. We have built a house, bought agricultural land and motorbikes with this money. We spend on food, gadgets and clothing. We don’t know anything else other than talking to people and duping them."

Azzaruddin Khan (24), identified by police as a trainer, said he learnt the trade eight years ago, and confesses to being a compulsive con artist. It’s almost as if something inside him wakes up every time he makes a call.

"Many times, when I call my relatives, I end up asking them to get their KYC done and send them links (through which I defraud them). A few times I have duped these people unintentionally and have realised it only after they told me that money was debited from their bank account after they clicked on the link."

Identifying marks and getting their numbers is easy, the fraudsters say. There are people who sell databases of insurance companies, banks, wallet companies.

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Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com