Three foreigners swindle thousands from B'lore

BANGALORE: Two Americans and one Briton had launched a series of websites offering music and sex, with a back-end office in Bangalore, collected credit card details of millions across the world and reportedly swindled substantial amounts of money.

The cyber police in Bangalore had begun to unearth this fraud nearly a year after the Indian partner of the call centre complained to them about the suspicious nature of the parent company.

“The magnitude and implications of the case are huge,” additional director general of police Sushant Mahapatra, in-charge of cyber crime, told DNA. He said the case might be handed over to the CBI.

The company that the fraudsters supposedly ran in the US, Almond Inc, turned out to be a fake one after the India partner Srinivas Mahesh filed a complaint with the police.

Americans Daniel S Pena and Bill William Smith and UK national Sally Hall, a chartered accountant by profession, are said to have stolen the credit card details when customers visited their pay sites which were in fact illegal proxy websites, substitutes to real websites. The proxy sites offered music and links to porn sites.

Bill has been arrested and released on bail, while the other two are believed to have escaped to Britain. Bangalore police say that enquiries have come in from the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI and other anti-fraud agencies from the US.

The trio told Mahesh that they were high advertisement spenders on google.com and were into downloading and subscription business for 500 websites. They told him they needed an Indian partner to take care of “search engine optimisation, pay per click service optimisation and customer relationship management.”

Mahesh first smelt a rat when the office was shifted to a different location in Bangalore a month later. “That was when I realised that Almond Inc did not exist,” he told the investigating officer.

A few of their websites  like www.mp3HQ.com were proxy websites and certain links took the visitors to porn websites.

When people visited the sites to download music or any other information they were asked to pay one dollar but were charged ten dollars. When Mahesh questioned the legality of their business the culprits assured him that they did nothing illegal.

“The three have been charged under Information Technology Act, 2000 for obscenity, hacking and tampering with computer source documents,” Mahapatra said.