Ahmedabad: School trustee’s son held for running illegal call centre from its premises

“We got information on Tuesday night that Viraj Desai, son of Ira Desai, the trustee of Ankur School in Paldi, was running an illegal call centre from the school compound using professional callers to target US-based citizens,” read the FIR filed by the Cyber Crime Cell Division.

After the complaint, a team from Cyber Crime Cell Ahmeda-bad raided the premises of Ankur School on the intervening night between Tuesday and Wednes-day and arrested six persons.

The arrested accused are Viraj Desai, a resident of Satellite in Ahmedabad, Monu Ojha, a resident of Naroda, Rohit Singh Bhati, a resident of Odhav, Manthan Khatik, a resident of Vasna, Ajitsinh Chauhan, a resident of Vastral and Pradip alias Pappu Chaudhary, a resident of Vastral in Ahmedabad. Police have also seized six laptops, eight cell phones along with routers and other devices from the school premises.

Following the arrests, Ahmedabad District Education Officer (DEO) issued a notice to the school trustees and principal on Wednesday. “While an FIR has been registered, we have issued a show-cause notice to the school trustees and the principal to reply within five days,” said Ahmedabad DEO, RC Patel. The notice said that the school building cannot be used for any purpose other than education and asked to explain how and why a call centre was running from there.

Rajdipsinh Jhala, deputy commissioner of police, Ahmedabad Cyber Crime cell, said, “The main accused is Viraj Desai who was earlier a property agent. His association with the trustee of the school provided him access to the school premises, which he misused. The other main accused is Monu Ojha, an IT expert who used to clone US-based websites for the gang. Pappu Chaudhary, who was arrested in some other cases earlier, provided laptops on rent to the gang. Rohit Singh Bhati and Ajitsinh Chauhan were also arrested in the past for working in dubious call centres. Another accused, Manthan Khatik, a staffer of Ankur School, used to work as call centre executive by night.”

Police said that the illegal call centre was active for the past month and as many as 30 clients in America were contacted by the accused gang.

Explaining their modus operandi, Jhala said, “Monu Ojha created a dummy website, usnetcashloan.com, an exact replica of popular finance website greendayonline.com. The accused gang got the data of US citizens through the dummy website, which stored the credentials of those who visited it. The accused then used to call up American citizens using a software, which displayed US based phone number on the phone screen of victims and claim that they are representatives of ‘social security administration’ department.”

“They then used to offer loans from the said department and at times, they used to threaten the victims saying that police officials have intercepted a vehicle with drugs and the victim’s social security number has been detected. They used to say the victims’ social security number has been ‘blacklisted’ and it will soon be suspended and the US government will then seize their properties. Instilling such fear in them, then used to extort money by asking them to pay through their Google Play or I tunes account. We have seized their laptops and are calculating the amount they have duped from US citizens till now,” said Jhala.

Police also said that the role of school administrators will also be probed. Viraj Desai has identified himself as CEO of Ankur School and a BJP politician on his social media accounts. His Facebook profile identifies him as ‘BJP leader’ and says he joined the party in 2015.

Jhala said, “Preliminary investigation has not revealed any connection of the accused with the the BJP.”

An office-bearer of the party in Ahmedabad said, “I don’t know the credentials of Viraj Desai in BJP. The party has around 17 crore members across the country and there might be people claiming themselves to be from the BJP”

The accused have been booked under IPC 419, 420, 384, 120 B for cheating by impersonation, fraud, extortion and criminal conspiracy along with sections of the IT Act.