Pasoon Nuralami Manalai (R) and Ibrahim Mahmad Iqbal
AHMEDABAD: In a bid to earn easy money, two foreign nationals — one from Mozambique and another from Afghanistan — began cheating US citizens, luring them with payday loans and later telling them to scan a QR code with which the accused withdrew money from the Americans’ accounts.
Adalaj police on Friday busted the call centre racket being run by the duo — Ibrahim Iqbal, 24, of Mozambique and Pasoon Manalai, 23, of Afghanistan — from a flat in Khoraj.
The accused told the cops that they were working for another Afghan national Yusuf who gave them leads to cheat the US citizens.
“Manalai is a PhD student from a premier institute in Gandhinagar and Iqbal is an MSc (IT) student from another premier institute in Ahmedabad. They came to India on the student visa and has a good education record so far,” said inspector J H Sindhav of Adalaj police.
Sindhav said that they got the numbers and contact details of Yusuf, who was also a student of the institute in Gandhinagar.
They were staying in an apartment at Reflection Pacifica Flats in Khoraj. When a team of Adalaj police reached there and barged into the flat, the accused threw their two laptops and two cellphones out from a window.
They later told the cops that they were running a call centre where they used to call up US citizens for personal loans and later ask them to scan a QR code at Bitcoin ATM centres. As the US citizens scanned the code, the accused would get their details and used to transfer the money in their account.
The cops booked them for cheating, breach of trust, criminal conspiracy and evidence destruction along with IT (information technology) Act and began an investigation