For months, Bihar's Muzaffarpur was home to a call centre from hell.
A company called DBR Networking had put up advertisements across social media, including , seeking agents for a call centre run by them. The catch: the applicants had to be women.
As soon as a woman would apply, police officials said, they would be shown dreams of a bright future and then be asked to pay Rs 20,000 to undergo training for the job, for which they would be asked to go to Muzaffarpur. The training would begin soon after, but so would a cycle of mental torture, fraud and, in some cases, even rape and forced abortions, said an official.
According to a First Information Report (FIR) filed by one of the survivors on June 2, she fell for the advertisement, thinking it was genuine, and reached the company's centre in Muzaffarpur, where there were around 150 women like her. She said she got in touch with one of the accused, Tilak Kumar Singh, and she and all the other women were trained to make calls and trick people into falling for scams.
The women were mentally tortured when they failed to meet their targets and the survivor who filed the FIR said she was raped when she missed hers. She alleged that Tilak Kumar Singh forced her to have sex with her on multiple occasions and then made her undergo an abortion when she got pregnant.
Nine people have been named as an accused in the FIR with the main accused being Manish Kumar Singh, a resident of Noida, who is said to be the owner of the company.
An official said Tilak Kumar Singh has been taken into custody and is being interrogated. Efforts are on to arrest the other eight, he added.
"Tilak Kumar has been arrested from Gorakhpur… The survivor has alleged that the accused kept on assaulting her in a room for several months," Awadhesh Dixit, Superintendent of Police (City), Muzaffarpur, was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.