A YouTuber going by the name Jim Browning recently exposed a scammer, who had been scamming people for thousands of dollars. Amit Chauhan, the owner of the call centre lives in DLF Magnolias of Gurugram and commutes around the city in his black Porsche, has been arrested by the Gurugram Police.
Amit Chauhan and his team of fake technical associates have duped customers from both the US and the UK for thousands of dollars in the promise of fixing technical problems on their computers.
According to police reports, more than 40,000 people in the US and the UK have been targetted by these kinds of scams.
Amit Chauhan, the mastermind behind the fake call centre was an engineering student that dropped out of Kurukshetra Institute of Technology and Management. Chauhan was also running a travel agency by the name of Faremart.com, but he also set up a fake call centre in the shadows. The call centre primarily consisted of a younger crowd employed by Chauhan. The employees faked their accents and their identities, posing as Microsoft's technical support representatives.
How did Amit Chauhan and his associates scam consumers?
Chauhan and his associates would contact consumers in the US and the UK and warn them of malware affecting their computers. They would then ask their victims to pay a huge amount of money to solve the problem or lose all of their personal data.
A typical scam begins with a victim's computer being replaced with a red screen that displays a Windows logo, a warning message and has a phone number. When a victim calls the displayed number, they are connected to the call centre located in Gurugram. Here, the employees would pose themselves as technical representatives from Microsoft and pretend to be in San Jose, California.
The victims are then threatened to pay thousands of dollars to get rid of the malware or lose all of their personal data. Now, a person that has very little technical knowledge would naturally be afraid and end up paying the money and this is what kept the fraudsters going.
The vigilante
Jim Browning, a popular YouTuber known to expose scammers, uploaded a video on his YouTube channel. When the Gurugram Police learnt of the video, they wasted no time to nab the fraudster and his associates.
Gurugram Police also raided Chauhan's home and claim to have gathered valuable information that could hold crucial information regarding the case.
Amit Chauhan has been filed under the following crime section - Sections 420 (cheating), 120 B (conspiracy) of Indian Penal Code and Sections 75, 43 and 66D of IT Act.
