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Nagpur/Mumbai: The spurt in unemployment, especially on the end of fresh engineering graduates has led to the illegal elements mushrooming in Nagpur. Similar such incident came to light when large numbers of engineering students from some of the prominent colleges of Nagpur were duped by the fake call centre. Recently, the Mumbai police busted a fake call-centre racket, wherein US citizens were conned by Indian telecallers. The incident has exposed the serious lapse on the part of these colleges, who failed to scrutinize the company credentials before allowing it to conduct campus drive.
One of the students who was recruited in this company through campus placement, informed on condition of anonymity, that around 50 students were recruited in an off-campus placement in December 2015.
During the placement drive, these students were not informed about the nature of work. The recruits were told that they will be working for BPO ‘I-Serve Communications Pvt Ltd’ in Mumbai and the remuneration will be ` 30,000 per month. They were also given travel allowance to Mumbai.
This student further informed that after joining, the recruits were provided lodging in a 3-star hotel in Mumbai. Afterwards they were told to join an office in Borivali. This office mostly had candidates selected from Nagpur. According to information, there were two offices, one in Borivali and other in Malad.
Initially, the candidates were given communication and American accent training. After the completion of the training, they were put on floor and were given a standard script which the candidates had to follow while on call with US citizens. “And this was when I realised something fishy was going on. I seriously suspected that the calls were fraud. The calls were initiated by recruits and taken over by supervisors if they smelled a gullible client,” the student said. She further added that many alert US citizens, after realisising the calls were fraud, used to bluntly tell that they know about the fraud.
” As soon as we realised that these calls were illegal, we left the job and returned home,” she said. The experience and unwillingness of college authorities to check the background of the companies coming for recruitment, has let student’s career in a fix.
Victims took loans to pay the penalty
Using the information obtained from data brokers, the company used to call potential victims by impersonating as US Treasury Department officials. Following the call script provided by the managers, the call-centre executives used to threaten the victims with arrests and fines if they did not pay taxes or penalties to the government. Sources informed that the executives used to decide the penalty amount and if the threats worked and the victim agreed to pay, it would then be increased. The source informed that some of the victims took loans to pay the penalty. The penalty would usually be upwards of $ 7,000.
