Call centre bust earns Lalbazar London pat

The national fraud and cyber crime chief of the City of London Police, Jonathan Frost, called up Calcutta police commissioner Anuj Sharma on Friday to congratulate him for busting a fake call centre racket that had duped almost 23,000 people in the UK.

The call came at the Calcutta top cop’s mobile number around 2pm, or around 9.30am in London.

Earlier this month, Calcutta police had closed down two fledgling call centres in the heart of the city, whose employees were allegedly posing as members of the Microsoft technical support team and swindling customers in the UK and the US out of lakhs of rupees. In many cases the racketeers had got hold of the customers’ bank details, causing huge monetary losses to them.