Nepal: 35 including Chinese national arrested for running fake call centre

Kathmandu: As many as 35 people, including a Chinese national, were arrested on Monday from a call centre in Tinkune, Kathmandu on suspicion of illegal activities and transactions.

Nepal Police arrested them during a raid at the Sky World call centre and seized the laptop, computer and other documents from the call centre, local media reported. The District Police Office Kathmandu spokesperson Dineshraj Mainali said, "The arrests were made on the suspicion of illegal activities and transactions. It is estimated by the police that there is Chinese investment in the call centre. 2,000 youths have been working in this call centre which has been operating for two years."

During the investigation, it was revealed that an organisation named Vaidya Organization is operating a call centre on leased premises. The centre provides loans to Indian citizens at high-interest rates using Chinese applications.
The police revealed that the house in which the call centre was being operated belonged to Suraj Vaidya, former president of the Federation of Commerce and Industry.

It added that the Chinese investors now target Indians to run their companies after several Chinese people were arrested from call centres here.
According to the employees working in the call centre, only those who are proficient in the Hindi language are employed there.

The call centre provides loans to Indian citizens and the staff working there have been working on loan recovery.
They send mass messages about loans to mobile phones used by Indian citizens and ask them to take loans. The details of the borrower are then recorded in the Chinese apps used by these centres and on the failure of recovery the borrowers receive threats from these call centres on the pretext of misusing personal data and pictures, local media reported.

The Chinese apps used for lending have servers located in Macau, Hong Kong and China.
A local police officer said that the police are underway arresting the people from such call centres but since these servers are offline and in China, it is challenging to investigate the illegal business.
Recently, there have been many illegal transactions in the name of call centres in Nepal. Police investigations show that illegal gangs are active in Nepal.

In a similar incident on Sunday, the police raided View Sky Business Solutions Pvt Ltd in Jankinagar, Rupandehi and arrested nine people from the call centre who were residents of Jankinagar. Police said that the nine accused including one Indian national as well.
The use of proxies to dupe Indian nationals and money laundering is rampant. Investigations have revealed that Chinese citizens or firms were involved in most of these scams and malpractices. (ANI)