THANE: The 23-year-old mastermind of the
fake call centre
scam,
Sagar Thakkar
alias Shaggy, might have fled to former soviet country of
Azerbaijan
, police say.
Initially after the raids at his
Mira Road call centers
on October 4 Thakkar was said to have fled to Dubai with his sister Reema, but now he is suspected to be in Azerbaijan, a senior officer from Thane police said.
Expediting the search for his associates, crime branch sleuths reached the door steps of some of them in Ahmedabad. “Their relatives said they were unaware of the suspects’ profession,” said a source.
Meanwhile, sources in
Ahmedabad police
said a list of 10 absconders, mainly from Ahmedabad and Vadodara, has been given to Gujarat police. The list include the names of Vikram alias Vicky Rajkamal Bhardwaj, Rahul Tilakraj Dogra and Kunal Chatrabhuj Nagrani. “But we have intelligence that the three accused had fled to Thailand,” said a source.
Shaggy is believed had alerted his counterparts before fleeing as a number of calls centres have closed down their operations just after the raids in Mira Road.
Shaggy features twice in the indictment filed by the US authorities. According the indictment, when Niesha J, a North Carolina resident was coerced into paying $180 in September 2013, Thakar provied the GPR card number to which the money was to be paid. Earlier, In another case in November 2012, wherein Wade C, a resident of Texas, he lost $195, Thakkar sent an email to Hardik Patel, another accused , saying: ‘Process as max as you can’.
(With inputs from Parth Shastri in Ahmedabad)