Job racket busted in Lucknow: How fake call centres operated with a fair degree of ‘professionalism'

Hindustan Times

4 hours ago

LUCKNOW The two fake call centres, operating in the guise of providing jobs to youths, busted by the Lucknow Police on Tuesday had been running like professionally structured firms for nearly two years.
The operators employed tele-callers to deceive job seekers. Each tele-caller was assigned daily goals and could earn a base salary of ₹8,000– ₹10,000, plus a 10% commission on the amounts swindled from each victim (job seeker). A single successful scam could net the caller ₹2,000 in just one day, said police.
The operators also impersonated HR personnel of reputed companies, conducted fake interviews over calls and sent forged appointment letters in exchange for money.
Nine people were arrested in back-to-back raids by the police at two locations, one in Azad Bihar Colony and another near the Outer Ring Road underpass. A large cache of laptops, mobile phones, forged documents and digital evidence was seized while two kingpins of the racket, Sandeep and Santosh, remained absconding.
'The tele-callers were given further training to make them sound legitimate. They had scripts, call lists and templates ready so that the victims genuinely believed they had landed jobs at major firms,' a senior officer from the surveillance cell said.
'The accused used data purchased from a Noida-based firm, Sai Enterprises, at ₹15000 per month to target job-seekers. They would get 100 CVs of the candidates in a day and call them to lure them to their dream jobs,' said DCP (south) Nipun Agarwal.
Another officer investigating the matter said, 'Once the victims were contacted, they were asked to pay registration fees ( ₹2,000), followed by verification charges ( ₹6,500), and finally a joining amount ( ₹15,000) in exchange for fake appointment letters.'
According to the police, the arrested accused, included four women and youngsters, many of them as young as 21.
The accused were identified as Priyanka Kashyap, 20, Shalu Vishwakarma, 21, Anchal Sharma, 20, Brushali Singh, 25, and Aarti Singh, 25 who usually made calls to the victims. Accused Ajay Pratap Singh, 53, Amit Singh, 53, Santosh Kumar, 31 and Kuldeep Singh, 40, were the senior employees of the gang, said police.
Kuldeep, one of the arrested accused from Rae Bareli, previously worked as a driver in Delhi and got involved with the masterminds before moving to Lucknow to oversee the operation
'Santosh Singh from Bihar's Hajipur helped the gang buy data from the portal, which gave CVs while Rahul from Gonda helped the gang with bank accounts for which he charged 20-22% for each account,' said the DCP.
'The police are now tracking financial links, SIM card usage and bank accounts linked to the syndicate, suspecting a wider inter-city network through money trail to identify where this money was going,' said the DCP.
WHO's WHO OF THE SCAM
Telecallers (arrested), trained to pose as HR executives of major firms
Priyanka Kashyap, 20, Shalu Vishwakarma, 21, Anchal Sharma, 20, Brushali Singh, 25, Aarti Singh, 25.
SR OPERATORS
Ajay Pratap Singh, 53, Amit Singh, 53, Santosh Kumar, 31, Kuldeep Singh, 40. Kuldeep earlier worked as a driver in Delhi; later helped run the Lucknow unit of the racket.
MASTERMINDS (Absconding)
Sandeep and Santosh. They operated the racket from Delhi, provided fake SIMs, job data & forged bank accounts.
KEY ASSOCIATES (Under Watch)
Santosh Singh (Hajipur, Bihar) – Supplied job data
Rahul (Gonda) – Arranged fake bank accounts for 20–22% commission