Scam call centre Hyderabad exposed by US YouTuber

Hyderabad: A scam call centre, allegedly functioning from a building right in the heart of the city’s IT Hub, has been exposed by a YouTuber based in the United States.

The YouTuber, who runs a channel ‘Scammer Payback’ claimed a ‘scamming company’ running from the fifth floor of a building near the 100 Feet road in Madhapur was duping thousands of people from the United States and Australia.

In a 19-minute video posted on his YouTube channel, which has so far garnered over four million views, the YouTuber Pierogi claims that he also successfully ‘frightened’ the scammers into paying back money to several persons who were conned by ‘executives’ of the company.

He shared their names and addresses and also CCTV footage from the premises that the scammers were operating from. Details of the people who were scammed and exact address of the office, IP addresses and names of a few executives are shown in the video.

Pierogi says the scammers had swindled money from thousands of people across the world and that he was monitoring them for quite some time. “It’s really hard to track the scammers as they dupe people. Money in the name of memberships, sponsorships is swindled,” he says.

He is also seen interacting with a victim in the United States and getting all information how she was scammed and conned of $1500. Pierogi collects the phone number of the call centre from the woman and makes a call to enquire about some deals, when the executive transfers the call to some other person.

Pierogi says he hacked into the scammer’s computer system network. “I am deleting as many as files from the computers of the scammers. Around 50,000 addresses and data of people from the United States and probably Australian nationals who were scammed is being deleted,” he says.

The video shows him getting a phone call from one person claiming to be Steve, who is a senior officer at the company. However, ‘Steve’ realizes something is fishy and immediately disconnects the call.

Pierogi claims he sent an email to different officials of the Telangana Police along with the video file informing them about the existence of the scamming centre. ‘For now, I have scared the scammers into shutting their scamming business for the day,” he says before signing off.

When contacted, the Cyberabad Police said they had not found anything suspicious so far.

“A team did go and check companies in the building,” a Cybercrime official said.