Lucknow: A day after arresting 119 employees and managers in what is being described as the busting of a ‘mini-Jamtara’ in Lucknow, police revealed that an alleged memorandum of understanding (MoU) existed with another gang operating in the United States. Investigators believe the agreement formalised the functioning of the fake international call centre and may provide vital clues about the organised fraud network’s operations.Lucknow Police wroteto the Uttar Pradesh Police Headquarters, requesting that the case be taken up with the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through established diplomatic and law enforcement channels to identify and trace the alleged masterminds believed to be operating from the United States, police said.DCP (Crime) Anil Yadav, who led the operation, said the probe revealed that the racket functioned through a multilayered structure, with the initial stages controlled by operators based in the United States before the calls were routed to the Lucknow call centre.“The operation allegedly began with US-based handlers or vendors, who acted as the masterminds of the syndicate. They supplied the technical infrastructure, victim databases, scam scripts and access to calling software. These vendors coordinated the entire operation remotely and assigned targets to the Indian call centre in Lucknow,” said Yadav.Yadav said the next layer involved generating fake pop-up alerts on victims’ computers. These fraudulent messages falsely warned users that their devices had been hacked or compromised and displayed a toll-free customer support number.“When victims called the number, the calls were automatically routed to agents operating from the Lucknow call centre, where trained callers impersonated representatives of the FBI, the US Marshals Service or the US TreasuryDepartment,” Yadav added.Police suspect that the first two layers, the vendors and the pop-up generators, were operated from the United States, while the Lucknow-based call centre, which formed the next stage of the operation, primarily handled live conversations with victims and executed the fraud using scripts provided by the overseas handlers.
