India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has announced that it has dismantled a transnational cybercrime syndicate involved in sophisticated tech support scams targeting citizens of Australia and the United Kingdom.
The fraudulent scheme has caused losses exceeding £390,000 ($525,000) in the United Kingdom alone.
The law enforcement operation, part of Operation Chakra V, conducted on July 7, 2025, included searches at three locations in Noida, one of which housed a fully operational fraudulent call center within the Noida Special Economic Zone.
Evidence collected by the CBI revealed that the call center, known as FirstIdea, utilized advanced calling infrastructure and malicious scripts to enable cross-border anonymity and target victims on a large scale. Two arrests have been made, including a key operative partner of FirstIdea.
“The operation was strategically timed with the victims’ time zones, leading to the discovery of live scam calls during the raids,” the CBI stated in a press release.
The syndicate posed as technical support personnel from reputable multinational corporations, such as Microsoft, to deceive foreign nationals by falsely claiming their devices were compromised and extorting money from them to resolve non-existent technical issues.
The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) attributed the arrests and disruption to 18 months of collaborative efforts between the CBI, NCA, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Microsoft to identify the criminal group and target their IT infrastructure.
Over 100 individuals in the United Kingdom reportedly fell victim to the tech support scam, which involved threat actors using spoofed phone numbers and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to route calls through multiple servers in different countries.
“More than 100 U.K. victims were contacted by a group offering to fix their computers for a fee, following a pop-up message indicating their device was infected or hacked,” the NCA revealed. “In reality, the scammers impersonated Microsoft employees, offering software solutions for a non-existent attack.”
Meanwhile, Nikkei Asia reported an expansion of scam centers in eastern Myanmar for crypto scams, despite a crackdown earlier this year, with at least 16 suspected scam sites documented and construction ongoing at eight sites.
