Daily Mail - 03.03.2020

Page 26 Daily Mail, Tuesday, March 3, 2020

By Tom Kelly
Investigations Editor

stop the

bank

scammers

Fraudsters at an Indian
scam call centre have been

filmed mocking British vic-

tims as they fleece them out
of thousands of pounds.
Horrifying footage shows the
crooks tricking people into
thinking their computers are
infected with pornography
then charging to ‘fix’ them.
Working from an office near
delhi, rows of swindlers used
Western aliases like Mary and
Chris Lawson to convince their
targets they were genuine.
Crime ringleader amit Chauhan
was filmed chuckling as he told
staff: ‘We don’t give a **** about
the customers.’
Other fraudsters sniggered at
one victim who wept and told how
he feared the costly ‘repairs’ would
give him a heart attack.
the footage comes almost a year
after the Mail infiltrated a fake
HMrC call centre in India and
secretly filmed scammers target-
ing 10,000 Britons a day and
threatening them with jail unless

Caught on camera,

the scammers who

f leece UK victims

Hacker spies on swindlers through CCTV in India

ish lifestyle and enjoying holidays

including Las Vegas.

dave Matika, a British victim of

the call centre, said the scammer

he spoke to kept saying people

had been trying to watch child

porn via his computer.

‘that just kept frightening me,

so I actually believed I had to buy

a firewall just to save my compu-

ter and save my name really,’ he

added. ‘He kept making me think

like he was a good friend of mine.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but

he just made it so easy.’

Panorama also claimed PayPal

failed to close a fraudster’s

account despite being warned he

was using it to rip people off.

Cash from some victims went

directly into Chauhan’s PayPal

account. One payment came from

Briton Perry adams, who said he

warned PayPal he feared he had

been scammed and explained

what had happened. ‘they said

that it was not a problem, they

would refund the money and they

would take up the issue on my

behalf and investigate it,’ he said.

the cash was refunded but eight

months later the fraudster was

still using his account to cash in,

Panorama reported.

sameer sharma, from delhi

police, admitted the crimes were

‘difficult to crack’.

He said: ‘Because we don’t have

victims, we [therefore] don’t have

accused and [that means] we

don’t have anything. It’s very diffi-

cult to link the accused with the

victim. It’s even difficult to find

out who is the accused.’

PayPal said it could not comment

on the case but remains commit-

ted to protecting customers.

a spokesman said: ‘We take this

responsibility very seriously and

use advanced fraud and risk man-

agement tools to keep our cus-

tomers and payments safe.’

they repaid non-existent tax bills.
despite our expose, Britons
remain the prime target for inter-
national phone scammers with
21million calls a month.
the latest footage emerged after
a British hacker broke in to the
Indian scam centre’s CCtV to spy
on the tricksters targeting victims.
using the name Jim Browning, he
also obtained recordings of 70,000
phone calls as the crooks fleeced
Britons from a delhi suburb.
the footage, passed to the BBC’s
Panorama, showed scammers
placing a fake pop-up warning
message on people’s computers
claiming they have been infected
with pornographic spyware.
they are told to phone Microsoft
for urgent technical support.
Victims who called the number,
which had nothing to do with
Microsoft, were charged hundreds
of pounds to ‘fix’ their computer.
In reality, the warning message
would have disappeared if they
switched their machine off.
the scam, which also targets
people in the us and australia
makes the call centre around
£370,000 a month. social media
photos show Chauhan living a lav-

Callous: Footage shows Amit Chauhan discussing swindle with staff at Delhi scam call centre he ran From the Mail, March 18, 2019

Con: Fraudsters mock target

Britons

fleeced

By fake

taXMen

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