A laptop has been seized which has the data of around 1 crore credit card holders.
A 33-year-old man has been arrested for his alleged involvement in selling credit and debit card details to those operating fake call centres, police said on Thursday.
A few days ago, a 28-year-old man was arrested for allegedly siphoning off money from the credit and debit card accounts of various people after collecting details over phone.
In continuation of the exercise to bust the nexus of the online cheats, Puran Gupta, who is also a member of this gang, has been arrested.
"Gupta used to provide the complete data of credit cards to the operators of the fake call centres.
"On the basis of this data, the scam callers called innocent persons giving an impression that they are calling from their bank and sought the required information necessary to transfer their money," said Romil Baaniya, DCP(Southeast).
A laptop has been seized from Puran which has the data of around 1 crore credit card holders.
He used to purchase data and sell it at Rs 5,000-10,000, said the officer, adding he used to sell the same data to many people and make money.
"Gupta worked as data entry operator and has passed class X. While working as data entry operator, he got the idea that he can make money by selling data as well. So, he started his own company in 2010 to provide data," said the officer.
A complaint was lodged on March 27 by Shushil Chandra Rastogi, who lost Rs 1.46 lakh after sharing details of his credit card with a call centre employee who claimed that his card was blocked and details were needed to unblock it.
Ashish was arrested on April 4. He disclosed that he was running a call centre to cheat innocent people.
Four-five persons used to make calls to people daily to cheat them on the basis of the data of credit card users.
Puran used to provide this data to Ashish.
After obtaining the details of Puran and with the help of technical assistance, police arrested him on April 10 from his office in South Ganesh Nagar.
Puran used to provide data and details of different categories and profiles of persons as required by his clients. In 2010, he created a firm in the name of 'First Step Services and Solutions'.
"This firm was created for data collection, data entry, data market research, online promotion etc. He purchased credit card data from Mumbai.
"He also got his firm registered on Just Dial services. His clients used to call him through Just Dial and seek the data required by them," said the officer.
The amount in exchange of the data was deposited in his account and then he used to transfer the data through email.
The data contained in his laptop as well as his email has been analysed and found that he is in possession of data of almost 1 crore people. He had stored the data in different folders with different categories as per requirement of his clients.
Some of the categories were -- senior citizens who are users of credit/debit or ATM cards, Facebook data, scholarship students data, student data who has passed class XII, WhatsApp data, credit card data statewise, credit card data limit wise, etc.
When the call centre employees called a target, they used to state the card number, card holder name, date of birth, etc so that the target is tricked into confidence in believing them.
This social engineering technique leads to even educated people falling prey to their tactics.
The main supplier of credit card data to Puran is from Mumbai and is yet to be arrested.