Court denies bail to 21 cyber crime accused

A Delhi court has denied bail to 21 persons arrested for allegedly operating a spurious call center and duping foreign nationals by gaining remote access to their computers, saying that such acts demean the image of the nation. Metropolitan Magistrate Ashwani Panwar said that augmentation of cyber crimes, particularly in cases where people operate a network to lure gullible people into fake schemes and cheat them of their hard-earned money, is a serious threat to society.

“Moreover, such incidents demean the image of our nation as the fraud was allegedly committed with the foreign nationals mostly US Nationals,” the judge stated in the July 15 order.

Noting that all the accused had consciously agreed to run the call center, the court rejected the bail by observing that the investigation in the present matter is at a nascent stage and the co-accused persons are yet to be arrested.

Delhi Police said the accused were found to be operating a call center where they engaged in committing fraud and used to contact the foreign nationals on the pretext of providing Amazon solutions customer services. The police further said that the accused used to dupe people by gaining remote access to their computer systems and then cheat them by redeeming Amazon Coupons or gift cards which they used to make people purchase in lieu of having provided fake repair services. Counsels of the accused, however, apprised the court that their clients are of young age, have clean antecedents, and are being falsely implicated in the case. They said that only Information Technology (IT) Act should have been invoked in the matter rather than the offence of cheating under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and that the police did it to sensationalize the case.

The bail plea was filed by accused Saurav Sharma, Shubham Verma, Akash Panwar, Girish Kumar, Ritik Singh, Dheeraj, Akash Kumar, Mohd. Ataulla Alam, Jahid, Yogesh Soni, Ranjeet Rasaily, Dheeraj Mishra, Prince Kumar, Devraj, Suraj, Sanchit Sikri, Jitender, Sanjay, Jatin Mehra, Harshwardhan Singh, and Rahul Tanwar, who were arrested on July 13.