A total of 56 people in the US and India, and five call centres in India, have been charged by the US Department of Justice of defrauding Americans of millions of dollars through phone scams.
The people charged in the US all appear to be of Indian origin, judging by their names. The DoJ lists the charges against them as conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and giving false statements in their passport applications.
The call centres named in the indictment are HGlobal, Call Mantra (aka Robust Inc, Raytheon International), Worldwide Solution, Zoriion Communications and Sharma BPO Services. All are located in Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat and have been accused of collusion in the scam.
The break-up of people charged and their affiliation – 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 makes for a total of 32 people in India and 24 in the US.
{loadposition sam08}Twenty of the 24 suspects in the US have been arrested. One more is in immigration custody, two arrests are pending, and the last is still being sought.
The indictment says 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.
The detailed, 81-page indictment said more than 15,000 residents of the US had fallen victim to these scams beginning in January 2012.
It lists numerous victims of the various scams and the role of the accused in each of them.
Money transfers between the two countries were made using the hawala system and agencies like Western Union and MoneyGram.
Announcing the indictment, Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney-general of the Justice Department's criminal division said: "The indictment we unsealed and the arrests we made demonstrate the Justice Department’s commitment to identifying and prosecuting the individuals behind these impersonation and telefraud schemes, who seek to profit by exploiting some of the most vulnerable members of our communities.
“This is a transnational problem, and demonstrates that modern criminals target Americans both from inside our borders and from abroad. Only by working tirelessly to gather evidence, build cases and working closely with foreign law enforcement partners to ensure there are no safe havens can we effectively address these threats."