Hyderabad’s Athwalines Police busted a con call centre on Saturday and arrested five people, including two women, for defrauding around 300 victims of approximately Rs 45 lakh in the past few months. The accused allegedly used a Facebook page called ‘Ranga Reddy’ to offer fraudulent loans, collecting sensitive details from individuals seeking financial assistance.
According to the police, the scammers set up a fake loan service on Facebook to lure potential loan seekers. They would collect personal information, such as bank account details, mobile numbers, and addresses, and then forward these details to Ravindra Saluja, a Surat-based accused. Saluja would verify the information and send it to the main accused, Satinder Pal, who operated from Mumbai.
Satinder Pal would instruct the loan seekers to maintain a certain bank balance and provide an OTP (One Time Password). With this OTP, Pal would siphon money directly from the victims’ accounts into his own.
The authorities received a tip-off about the fraudulent operations taking place in Maher Park and raided the premises, finding five suspects—Viren Barne, Rahul Baviskar, Ashish Pal, Rutuja Patil, and Puja Rathod—actively working with phones and laptops. During the raid, the police seized:
13 mobiles
4 laptops
1 Wi-Fi router
WhatsApp chat logs from 18 victims
A list of customers intended to be targeted
Preliminary investigations revealed that the call centre operation had defrauded 300 individuals to the tune of Rs 45 lakh. Police have booked the accused under BNS and the IT Act for cheating, and further investigations are ongoing.
The police are continuing their probe into the scam, aiming to uncover any additional perpetrators or locations involved in the operation.
