New Delhi: A 10-day operation spread across 22 cities Thursday culminated in the arrest of 65 fraudsters, who were part of a syndicate behind the ‘BSES scam’. The operation was conducted by Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police.
Officers familiar with the arrests explained how members of the racket preyed on vulnerable targets using technology and by creating a sense of confusion and urgency.
For instance, a target would receive a message saying: “Dear customer, your power will be disconnected tonight at 9:30 pm from the electricity office because your previous month’s bill was not updated. Please immediately contact our electricity officer 6*********. Thank you.”
The alarmed target would assume that the message is legitimate and call the given number to resolve the issue. Members of the syndicate would then impersonate officers of the electricity board and either seek the target’s bank account details or get the target to install a remote access software on his/her phone.
Once they had access to the target’s bank account or cell phone, the fraudsters would transfer large sums of the target’s money to dummy accounts.
In order to bust this syndicate of fraudsters, the IFSO carried out raids across cities in Bengal, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Jharkhand, Bihar and Delhi-NCR.
Sources said it was the Jamtara, Jharkhand, based kingpins of the racket — among those arrested — who oversaw…
