MUMBAI, Aug. 18 -- Ten persons have been arrested for defrauding students seeking admissions to various professional courses in an operation run via a call centre in Pune. Powai police, who registered the complaint in May, said the accused were arrested on Sunday. They had also created Instagram and Facebook accounts, where they posted advertisements to connect with vulnerable students desperate to enrol in engineering and other courses. Police have seized 22 mobile phones and 23 SIM cards, and traced a bank account with a balance of Rs.24 lakh. The account has recorded transactions amounting to Rs.1.37 crore. The accused had opened a call centre in Lohegaon in Pune in 2019 and the callers would promise admissions under the NRI or management quotas at prestigious institutions and universities. They also visited various campuses and pretended to have connections at these institutes to gain the students' trust. The accused would collect money from the students-ostensibly as token sums, advances, or first-year tuition fees-mostly in cash. For those unwilling to pay in cash, they accepted payments into a specific bank account. The accused and operators at the call centre would abscond just before the official admission lists for the respective colleges were published. They would also destroy the mobile phones and SIM cards they used to run the scam. Datta Nalawade, deputy commissioner of police, Zone 3, said that the accused operated primarily during the start of the academic year and shut down their call centres and flee before the admission process began. The Powai police was able to track them down even though they did not use the mobile phones and SIM cards used in the crime for any other transactions. The accused are from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Jharkhand....