Thane call centre scam: The kingpin and his empire

A day after Thane police arrested Sagar Thakkar alias Shaggy, the alleged kingpin in the multi-crore call center extortion racket, the police now suspect that Thakkar was also involved in other call centre frauds such as immigration, pharma and banking. Police sources also claimed that since Thakkar was cornered, he decided to return to India and face charges. He was not deported.

Thakkar had been absconding, and later fled the country after bogus call centers set up by him at Mira Road were busted by the police in October 2016. He was arrested on Friday night from Mumbai’s international airport. 

The police had issued a Look Out Circular (LoC) against Thakkar, and on Friday was informed by Mumbai airport immigration authorities that he had arrived in Mumbai from Dubai. He was then arrested in the wee hours of Saturday.

“Thakkar told us how he used to operate the racket, which was not limited to Mira Road only. He had also set up bogus call centres in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Noida, Gurugram, Chhattisgarh, Kolkata and Shillong. Most of these call centres were shut down after the raid at Mira Road,” said Parambir Singh, Thane Commissioner of Police.

“Shaggy also told us that there are multiple scams operating in India. Though he denied his role in the other scams, we are trying to find out if he was involved,” added Singh. Thakkar told the police that he had used a technique of call burner/call masking through which the caller’s location could not be tracked. After masking the numbers, the call blasting technique was used to scam people.

“The racketeers had accessed data of US citizens from a white pages software. Thakkar also had few contacts in the US who would sell customer data to him. Thakkar shared information about the other absconding accomplices, including Tapesh Gupta,” said an officer.