He is just a 23-year-old but he has managed to amass Rs 500 crore in a year! You ask how? By being the mastermind of India’s biggest tele-fraud and excelling in the art of cheating foreigners.
Just a few days back, Mumbai police busted a multi-crore call centre racket in Mira Road that duped US citizens, and the brain behind all this is Shahgar Thakkar, alias Shaggy. Shaggy owns several high-end cars and is a multimillionaire, but is now on the run.
After investigation, the police found that Shaggy ran three call centres that were collectively pocketing around Rs 1 to 1.5 crore daily by posing as US taxmen.
While all this reads like a movie script, here’s how he actually manged to pull it off, according to this Economic Times report:
- Thakkar first picked his men through ads on social media demanding no qualification for call centre work. He then acquired the contact numbers of several US citizens from hackers in US (paid Rs 1 lakh for about 10,000 contracts)
- Selected call centre staff trained to speak in fluent US accent, used to make calls by posing as officials of the US Internal Revenue Service or the immigration department.
- They used VoIP and placed calls to US citizens and used to tell their clients that he/she has defaulted on taxes and must pay up immediately or else they would get arrested.
- Out of 100 calls made per day, 10 to 15 calls would materialise and of these three to four gullible people were duped into revealing their bank details, and the employees of the call centre would then withdraw money from their accounts.
- The staff used to demand $10,000-20,000, later settle for $5,000-3,000. All of them were told to make payment through pre-loaded cards and were also asked told to share 16-digit code of pre-loaded cash card with the call centre employee, who helped debit the required amount.