Are Adarsh Jaiswal & Deepika Verma fronting a company scamming elderly pensioners on the NSW North Coast?

Snapshots taken 13 August 2011

Click on images to enlarge

Excerpt from The Daily Examiner 15 August 2011:

The South Grafton pensioner said she thought it was her internet service provider Bigpond – talking urgently in a thick Indian accent – after all, he knew her full name.

“We need to check your computer Shirley,” the voice said. “People are getting in and stealing gigabytes.”

Before she knew it, Shirley's screen was scrolling madly and the voice on the phone said, “look, they're taking stuff now”.

“I must have given him permission (to access the computer remotely) but I don't remember. He took control of the mouse.”

The man told her it would cost $159 to fix the problem and she would need two “installations” to get coverage for life.

So Shirley, desperate to stop the cyber thieves, gave her credit card number and she was billed $318.

But it dawned on Shirley that she had been scammed.

“I couldn't sleep all night and I was so ashamed I didn't want to tell anyone,” she said. “I know I've been stupid but they sounded so genuine.

“My granddaughter was so cranky that someone would rip me off, she told me to go to the police and the Examiner because these people were obviously targetting older people.”

Shirley received an invoice from E-Pro Solution via email for a 24-month platinum plan support package. The invoice said the company was based in Luton, London.

That is what happened once a man called “Chris” telephoned a 77 year old woman living in the Clarence Valley.

Now E-Pro Solutions states on its website that it has offices in the U.K. and India and that it is owned and operated by NDCL INFOSOULE.

This company sells a product with the same description as the one ‘sold’ to the pensioner and its published price is equivalent to the amount of money paid by credit card for said product.

There is a company called NDCL INFOSOUL which can be called up with a simple Internet search. It happens to currently share the same physical address in India with E-Pro Solutions, as well as the identical main landline telephone number.

The very dodgy method used to sell product has been reported by Internet users for the last two years at least and could easily be called a scam.

Here is one post on a Whirlpool forum this year:

Not sure if anyone has received calls from this apparent company so far, but I received one today and it sounded super dodgy, so I just wanted to warn others about it (although admittedly most people who browse this type of website/forum probably wouldn't get sucked in for this sort of call).

They say they are from E-PRO SOLUTIONS, a company which has been employed by "Windows Computer Maintenance Department."

They say they have discovered that you have inadvertently downloaded junk from the internet and it is slowing down your computer, and that they can quickly remedy the problem by going through a process which I think allows them remote access to your computer.

They say they are calling from an office in Australia (the address they gave me was 83 Yaran Street, Evans Head, NSW 2473), but the three people I spoke to (two guys and one girl) all had heavy Indian accents (two of the names they gave me were David Mark and Peter Williams), and they also lied when I asked them about the weather there at the time.

When I asked for their details, the phone number they gave me was: 08 7200 7207.

Cheers.

It should be noted here that the address cited in the post does not exist as Yaran Street is a short street with no more than 18 residential lots according to Google Maps and, the telephone number is three digits out from E-Pro Solutions published West Australian telephone number.

Reverse Australia has fielded so many queries that it now features sample complaints like this one:

Contacted by "Julia Kidman" and "Harry Watson", so say from South Melbourne, Victoria, both working for E-Pro Solutions, acting on behalf of Microsoft Windows, that they had detected problems on our computer.
Landline contact is : 0872 001 707
Website: www.e-prosolutions.com , and
Email address: support@www.e-prosolutions.com
Requested to go into “start and r “ depressed together, and looked at application and system logs with errors and warnings in them. Asked to count the number of each, and got to about 30 warnings and about 5 or more errors or so, in each, then stopped scrolling through.
Asked for peoples names, and provided with above names, which are English names, but the people were Indian (or Pakistani), by accent. Was to be put through to technicians, via the “Support Connection” window, and they were going to provide a password, which should not be given to anyone else!!
I hung up and checked the White pages, which does not have a name anything like "E-pro solutions".
These people through their website, www.e-prosolution.com, should be tracked down, or they are just using this website for their own purposes. Whatever the situation, do not touch with a barge pole.
Tony, Perth, Western Australia 19 April 2011

E-Pro Solutions is also implicated in similar complaints in the U.S. and Microsoft Answers has been fielding queries about E-Pro since 2010. An e-commerce company dri swreg cardquery com is sometimes mentioned as processing its online billing

It is possible that E-Pro Solutions is unaware of this ‘scam’ and Mr. Adarsh Jaiswal & Ms. Deepika Verma are legitimate business people. That the problem may lie elsewhere.

I leave that up to readers to decide.