Here we have another cautionary tale about off-shoring customer service when faced with the reality of Call Center Scams that commit fraud via Tech Support Scams and Government Impersonation. In this case, FirstIdea, an Indian company is charged with committing fraud against at least 100 victims from Australia and the UK.
FirstIdea.us, according to their website, provides Debt Collection services for ADP, Aetna, Aramark, BASF, Bic, CareOne, CostCo, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shielf, JPMorgan Chase, Kessler, Siemens, Sony, and others.
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| firstidea.us website “Our Clients” page |
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) recently announced Operation Chakra V, which claims Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Japan’s National Police Agency, and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) as partners. The Operation has had many focuses and has been ongoing for several months, including a bust of an Amazon-imitating call center today (10AUG2025).
One of the most significant findings was announced last month, as 37 were arrested with the announcement that 850,000 money mule accounts (8.5 Lakh) had been opened at 743 bank branches. That announcement pointed out a total disregard for KYC (India calls it Customer Due Diligence) and widespread failure to file STRs (Suspicious Transaction Reports.)
While there are dozens of articles that could be written about the successes of Operation Chakhra V, I want to focus on a ring-leader arrested in raids in Noida on July 7th. According to CBI’s First Information Report (FIR) (similar to a Criminal Complaint in the US) Nishant Walia, Arjun Prakash, and Arjita Chopra were considered Significant Persons in a fraudulent Call Center operation.
Nishant Walia operated FirstIdea Solutions where Arjun Prakash was listed as a director. Nishant and Arjun were co-directors at several companies, including Marvello Infotech, FirstIdea Solutions, and DroidOne InfoSol.
Whistle-blowers who post on “Scammer.info” share more details and point out that Nishant’s other company, Click Aurum, is also worth looking into. In that chat thread, “Rogger” says they are “running outbound calling in UK, AUS and ask for cancellation and collect money from them.
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| https://scammer.info/t/https-www-youtube-com-watch-v-xow1vct-whg/57340 |
While the date on the Scammer.info post shows Nishant Walia was “in the game” as early as May 2020, a UK court document actually puts the timeline even earlier. In a case against one Baljinder Singh in a document dated 04JUL2019, we find that “Devine Technical Services Ltd” based in the UK was linked to “an Indian company which purported to provide online technical support for computer users.” In that earlier case it is explained “The nature of the fraud was that computer users were made to think that their machines had been infected with viruses or had been subject to hacking and were encouraged to pay for the services of the IT support company.” Mr. Singh was charged with money laundering, receiving payments totaling £300,188 from victims of the scam and forwarding the proceeds (minus his commission) to Nishant Walia in India.
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| https://crimeline.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/singh2019ewcacrim1428.pdf |
Dozens of Indian media outlets shared the story of Nishant’s arrest, calling him a “Key Operative” a “Kingpin” or a “Leader” of a “Cyberfraud syndicate.”
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| https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-arrests-key-operative-of-cyber-fraud-syndicate-targeting-uk-and-australian-citizens/article69788011.ece |
While Nishant has been arrested by the CBI and charged with running a major fraud call center operation, Arjun Prakash claims to have moved to Hawaiian Gardens, California and began operating as the “Business Owner & Chief Executive Officer” of FirstIdea, sharing the firstidea.us website in his LinkedIn profile, but claiming to have worked their consistently for 9 years and 10 months (since October 2015) making it clear that this is the same organization.
According to business registration documents, Arjun left the company, opening a debt collection service in the US using the domain “firstidea.us” which he registered in 2015 using his personal gmail account ([email protected]) and later renewed using the company gmail ([email protected]). Clearly, despite resigning his directorship, Arjun was still part of the company.
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| linkedin.com/in/aazur (now deleted) |
We have seen this pattern repeatedly where a company establishes an off-shore relationship for a business process operation that requires the sharing of #PII, and then operators of that same call center are subsequently accused of running fraudulent call centers.
