Thane: A 33-year-old man, who allegedly mentored the young kingpin of the over Rs 500-crore Mira Road call centre scam, was arrested on Sunday.
Police questioned Jagdish Kanani, a partner in a BPO business in Hari Om Plaza at Mira Road, about the functioning of the telephone scamming cartel. A top policeofficer confirmed the arrest and said it was a major breakthrough in the case as Kanani is the “creator” of phone frauds and mentor of 23-year-old Sagar Thakkar, alias Shaggy.
“We have information that Kanani is the one who cracked the code of making easy money by misusing technology and playing on the fears of people. He had worked on US processes as a call centre employee and was familiar with the operations that involve calling up US citizens and exerting pressure on them to repay their credit card dues,” a police source told TOI. He added that Kanani had made investments in call centres and played a vital role in setting up fake ones across the country different names.
Police claimed Kanani had coached Thakkar on how to con US citizens from India and misuse magicJack devices—they plug into a USB port on the user’s computer and have a standard RJ-11phone jack into which any standard phone can be plugged. “Kanani and Thakkar would pose as tech support callers from legitimate IT software firms and ‘alert’ a victim of a computer virus. They would ‘fix’ the computer and also charge for a maintenance contract,” said the source.
Meanwhile, the crackdown on Mira Road call centres has broken Thakkar’s back as he was planning to set up five-eight offices in Mumbai and Ahmedabad as part of his ‘business expansion plan’. “The cartel had interviewed over 400 job aspirants in Mumbai and Ahmedabad and selected over 100 for the setups Thakkar was to launch in Ahmedabad,” a police officer said. “Thakkarwas interested in newly constructed commercial buildings as till the other blocks would be rented or sold, the call centre operations would be smooth and no one would know what was going on.”