Bengaluru, Jul 9 (IANS): The Karnataka Police have busted a call centre racket operating out of Bengaluru that used to target US citizens. The fraud call centre's activities involved cheating gullible people in the US by obtaining their bank details and siphoning off the money.

At least 72 employees of the call centre racket, including the kingpin were taken into custody in the operations conducted by teams from the Whitefield and Mahadevapura police stations.

A joint team of Whitefield and Mahadevapura police stations conducted simultaneous search operations on late Thursday evening at two locations after receiving information on a fake call cyber being operated from there.

A total of 138 computers and other equipment were seized during the operation.

According to police officers, the entire racket was being run by two individuals belonging to Ahmedabad.

Employing young graduates, mainly from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi, the racket mainly targeted people from the US.

The modus operandi involved sending text messages to potential targets through text messages, voice mail etc that a fraudulent/ suspect transaction is noticed in one of their accounts such as bank account or Amazon account and they are calling on behalf of Amazon or their bank, to resolve the fraudulent transaction.

They would finally zero in on the gullible persons who would trust the callers.

The accused were also seen using vans disguised as school vans to transport the employees, police said.