A man alleged to be behind duping Americans of millions of dollars through phone scams has been arrested in Mumbai.
In October last year, following an indictment issued by the US Department of Justice, Indian police carried out raids on a number of call centres in a suburb of Mumbai but failed to apprehend the mastermind of the operation.
The Wall Street Journal said that the man was arrested on Saturday morning at the airport on his return from abroad.
Sagar Thakkar was alleged to have started the call centres that carried out the scams and then fled to Dubai and Bangkok when the police got on his trail.
{loadposition sam08}An investigating officer, Nitin Thakare, said the courts had allowed the police to keep Thakkar in custody for interrogation until 13 April. His Audi R8, impounded in October, was being held as evidence.
"He is very intelligent," Param Bir Singh, commissioner of police in the Mumbai suburb of Thane, told the WSJ. "I am very impressed with his knowledge” about this scam call centre business.
The scams against Americans were carried out from call centres in both Mumbai and Ahmedabad, the latter city being in the Indian state of Gujarat.
The call centres named in the indictment are HGlobal, Call Mantra (aka Robust Inc, Raytheon International), Worldwide Solution, Zoriion Communications and Sharma BPO Services.
According to the indictment, the break-up of people charged and their affiliation was – HGlobal: 18 each in India and the US; Call Mantra: three each in India and the US; Worldwide Solution: two in India, three in the US; Zoriion Communications: seven in India; and Sharma BPO Services: two in India. This meant a total of 32 people in India and 24 in the US.
Twenty of the 24 suspects in the US were arrested at the time.
In some cases, people from these call centres pretended to officers of the US Internal Revenue Service and defrauded Americans by claiming they owed money to the IRS and saying they would be arrested and fined if they did not pay their back-taxes right away.
In other cases, staff from these call centres impersonated officers from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and misled US residents into believing they would be deported unless they paid fines for alleged irregularities with their residence papers.
In a third category of cases, US residents were misled into believing that they were eligible for so-called payday loans and that they needed to pay a small fee upfront to indicate that they had enough funds to repay the loan.
And in a fourth set of cases, the call centres misled Americans into believing they were eligible for fictitious government grants and asked them to pay an upfront fee towards an IRS tax or a processing fee.