Questions Lead to Answers…………………….. Again..

By the year 2015, there was a sudden spurt in calls offering bonus on health insurance policies to the customers who were loyal to their insurers and continued paying premium in time. Some insured even?received calls stating that their policy had lapsed and they need to renew the same for claiming their bonus amounts which were lying unclaimed. A so called nominal processing fee was also asked for to take up the case with the insurance companies for releasing this bonus amount….

The question that should have come to the mind of the people who received such calls ………….. Who are these angels on earth ??? Why are they so much worried for unknown people that they are following up so religiously to get the Bonus amounts paid ??? What is their interest in doing such a noble job ???

Unfortunately no one bothered to ask these questions to themselves or the callers… a known fact - easy money most of the times clouds our common sense and?logical reasoning takes a back seat.

Many people fell prey to such calls and started depositing the amounts in the bank accounts, the details of which were provided to them. The well trained call center executive assured?the innocent customers that their ?bonus will get credited into the account very soon.?In some instances when the customer followed up a lot, the floor supervisor was put on the call to answer the queries of the customer. This supervisor would tell the customer that if his/her ?application for claiming bonus is to be fast tracked, an additional processing fee needs to be deposited and ?this processing fee will be returned along with the Bonus amount to the customer.

The conviction with which these pitches were made, even highly qualified people working at very senior levels in government as well as private sector got ?convinced and deposited the amounts which were asked as Premiums for renewal of policy or Processing fees for processing of Bonus amounts.

Who were these people ??? How they were getting access to the customer data base??? How did they manage to get accurate information before calling the customers ???? Where are they operating?from ??

All these questions kept us awake for nights and all sort of tracking of phone numbers and backwards?working was done by the teams. But it seemed that these Call Centre executives were a step ahead. A single phone number was used only for a few days or weeks and then it was dead.

The issue was taken up with several departments of Police including cyber crime, crime branch and?special cells. A big complexity in such cases was that who will become the complainant here??? The people who have lost money to these fake callers were actually the victims and they should have filed complaints with the Law Enforcement Agencies for the fraud to which they have fallen prey to… But no one was willing to get into the legal complications….

Since there was no major crackdown happening, these calls kept on increasing day by day. The matter became serious and finally the matter was taken up with top police officials as the quantum of Fraud crossed over a few million INRs. The Police teams swung into action and after 2 months of surveillance and data collection on the locations the biggest crackdown was planned, 6 teams were created and on a single day, raids were conducted at 4 locations in Delhi NCR and 2 locations in Western UP. Over a 100 people including callers, data managers, call center managers, were arrested - The news of this crackdown made history. Funds accumulated in several bogus bank accounts were identified to the tune of several millions. Properties bought from these funds were identified and they were confiscated. The arrested criminals when questioned about the usage of money were proud to say “ they lived life king-size, they never cooked food, always ordered from outside. They never washed clothes because they always bought new ones and used them only a couple of times..”

After this operation, several small call centers were also identified and raided based on the tip offs from the culprits and their style of working was understood in detail. Involvement of the Cyber Cells of various states played a key role in understanding the modus operandi of the fraudsters and strategies were made to plug the gaps in data security.

Over the period of one and a half year, the fraudsters also evolved and new ideas of cheating kept on coming. But now with the basic understanding being there, several such fraudsters were caught and send to jail by the Investigation Team and money of several innocent people got recovered. During these exercises,?a few data operators were also identified and appropriate legal actions were taken against them.

?Now we had answers to all our questions….

How do they get the data so easily ????

How do they get such accurate information ???

How are they able to convince the victim to pay them several thousands of Rupees under various pretexts???

?We had our Answers now and we knew what is to be done next………