Police from Thailand’s Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau (CCIB) have arrested six members of a call centre gang who allegedly preyed on victims by luring them into clicking on false bank links in SMSs and siphoning off all the money from their bank accounts.

Four devices, which sent fake bank SMSs to bank customers, were also seized in a raid on an apartment in Bangkok’s Bang Waek area.

Pol Gen Damrongsak Kittipraphat, the national police chief, said that the gang managed to steal more than 10 million baht from the bank accounts of about 30 victims.

The suspects reportedly told the police that they received the four SMS generating devices from gang members in a border town and brought them to the capital to target prey in Bangkok, Nonthaburi and Samut Prakan.

The fake SMSs, claiming to come from their victims’ banks, notified them that their bank accounts had been hacked and advised them to open the provided link, so that the bank can save their accounts from the hackers.

When the victims clicked on the links on their cell phones, money in their bank accounts would be siphoned off, said the national police chief.

Some time ago, the Bank of Thailand and commercial banks notified their customers they had stopped sending SMSs, to prevent their account holders from being cheated by call centre scammers using fake SMSs.