How cyber gangs involved in work-from-home, OTP scams used data files to find targets, dupe them

Police found that the three men arrested in this case —Nirmal Vijay (45), Mosin (31), and Javed Chanda (42) — worked out of Gujarat and Rajasthan and would target the elderly and women.

DCP (Outer) Jimmy Chiram said they worked with unknown associates in China who helped them with logistics and took care of bank accounts to receive the cheated amount. “The accused would contact elderly people, mostly women, and offer them a job from home — liking YouTube videos or posts on a site to earn money. The accused would later ask for investments in the name of reaching a higher level and cheat the victims,” said the DCP.

Police investigation also revealed the accused had organised data sets allegedly tailored to their requirements. “We seized two laptops and 11 phones and found the data they have stored… more than half of the data hasn’t been used. The accused said they would only target a small segment… 400-800 individuals in a go. Each data folder has multiple files and each file has at least 300-500 data entries,” said an officer investigating the case. Police said this data was further segregated into different files such as “age above 40”, “age above 60”, “women”, “men in Delhi-NCR”, “unemployed women” etc. The Indian Express accessed one such file that showed the data had age, name, phone numbers, gender, employment status, and address mentioned.

However, police suspect most of the data is “repetitive” and not sourced from reliable sources.

Last October, two men from a cyber gang, Sandeep Dalal (31) and Chanchal Singh (43), were arrested after more than 50 complaints were received against them on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal. Police said the duo was running a WFH scam. They also cheated people by posing as technicians from software firms taking their personal information, including OTPs.Police found that the accused in this case too used data sets in bulk and sold the data to other gangs.

“They worked in collusion with persons from marketing companies. We found the men were in touch with officials from telecom companies, employment-focused firms, and apparel companies from where they stole data…All these companies have data on people based on their gender, employment, and other factors,” said a police source.