India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has announced that it has taken steps to dismantle what it said was a transnational cybercrime syndicate that carried out “sophisticated” tech support scams targeting citizens of Australia and the United Kingdom.
The fraudulent scheme is estimated to have led to losses worth more than £390,000 ($525,000) in the United Kingdom alone.
The law enforcement effort, which was carried out on July 7, 2025, as part of Operation Chakra V, involved searches at three locations in Noida, one of which was a fully functional fraudulent call center operating from the Noida Special Economic Zone.
Evidence gathered by the CBI revealed that the call center, named FirstIdea, made use of advanced calling infrastructure and malicious scripts to facilitate cross-border anonymity and victim targeting at scale. A total of two arrests have been made, including a key operative partner of FirstIdea.
“The operation was meticulously timed with the time zones of the victims, resulting in the detection of live scam calls in progress during the raids,” the CBI said in a press statement.
The syndicate, the agency added, masqueraded as technical support staff of reputed multinational companies, including Microsoft with an intent to cheat foreign nationals by falsely claiming that their devices were compromised and extort money from them to address non-existent technical problems.
The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) said the arrest and disruption was the result of 18 months of “groundbreaking collaboration” between CBI, NCA, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Microsoft to identify the organized crime group and target the IT infrastructure used.
More than 100 people in the United Kingdom are said to have fallen prey to the tech support scam, which involved the threat actors using spoofed phone numbers and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to route calls through multiple servers in several countries.
“More than 100 U.K. victims had been contacted by a group offering to fix their computers for a fee, following a screen pop up that suggested their device was infected or had been hacked,” the NCA noted. “In reality, the fraudsters were posing as employees of Microsoft, offering software solutions to an attack that had never taken place.”
The development comes as Nikkei Asia revealed that the number of scam centers used to pull off crypto scams in eastern Myanmar is continuing to expand at a rapid pace despite a crackdown earlier this February, with at least 16 suspected scam sites being documented and construction ongoing at eight of them.
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