The Noida Cyber Crime Police on Tuesday arrested four men for allegedly defrauding foreign nationals by posing as “technical support agents” and instilling fear of hacking and data theft.

Police identified the accused as Mohammad Bilal (26), Dev Kapahi (25) and Kushagra Nimbekar (24) from Delhi as well as Abhishek Mukheja (27) from Rajasthan. All were arrested from Sector 76 in Noida.

Police said they recovered four laptops, eight mobile phones, four microphone headsets and two routers from their possession.

According to officers, the accused – highly educated men who spoke in foreign accent to gain the trust of victims – ran paid advertisements on social media platforms displaying toll-free numbers targeting users in the US and Europe. When the foreigners called these numbers after coming across the ads, the calls were routed to the accused through specialised calling software installed on their laptops.

Posing as technical support agents, the accused would convince the callers that their devices had been hacked. “They would then ask the victims to download screen-sharing applications. Once access was granted, the accused allegedly deployed malware that caused the victim’s screen to go black. Believing their systems had been compromised, the victims would panic and the accused would dupe them,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber Crime) Shavya Goyal.

“When the accused would hack their system, they would first find out the amount that the victims had in their bank accounts and then decide on how much money to extort, which typically ranged between USD 300 and USD 2,500,” Goyal added.

She further said that the group, active for around two months, converted the defrauded money into cryptocurrency using hawala networks.