BPM industry yet again target of scamsters

Mumbai call centres dupe Americans of Rs 500 cr

The $28-billion business process management industry has yet again been targeted by scammers to dupe money from US citizens. This time around, Mumbai police raided three call centres that duped US citizens of Rs 500 crore in the past one year by posing as IRS agents.

This is not the first time that such a fraud has emerged. Last year 3,000 people in the US fell prey to a similar scam. The IRS scam specifically has been running for some time in the US. Last year, two suspects were arrested in a similar fraud in Florida.

Industry players agree that though this has nothing to with the industry and the work it do such incidents does hamper the industry’s reputation.

“Such incidents obviously impact the industry, but this is not the first time that we have come across such an issue.  You have to understand that these firms were created to do fraud. They are not interacting with clients to get business or have sales team,” said Partha DeSarkar, CEO, Hinduja Global Solutions.

In the recent past, there have been an increase in such fraudulent activities in India. In order to tackle this menace, Nasscom — the IT/BPM industry body — earlier this year set up a Consumer Interest Protection Task Force (CIPTF) to create an appropriate framework that would cover and transcend different departments of the government to deal with this issue.  

Keshav Murugesh, CEO WNS, chairman Nasscom BPM council and chairperson CIPTF, said the first set of recommendations by the task force has already been made. “As part of the task force’s recommendation we have a three- level plan—prevention, detection and reporting, and investigation. We want to ensure that India’s leadership in this sector is sustained,” he added.

One of the recommendation of the task force was to establish an industrywide whistleblowing mechanism that allows employees to notify the authorities concerned about the wrongdoing.

The task force, in its report, also highlighted that the increasing by criminals duping people this way. Other than the IRS scam, sometimes fraudsters claim to be representing a reputed organisation either from the software or support industry and saying their system may be at risk of malware and virus attacks.

The victims generally allow access to machines and the fraudsters get access to the data.  

The Nasscom Task Force recommendation also acknowledged that in recent years, India has begun to appear as one of the locations from where such fraudulent schemes originate.

Law enforcement agencies in developed countries have acted against such individuals and companies over the past few years. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission launched an international crackdown that halted six tech support scams based mainly in India.

In other than tech support scam cases, in 2012, the FTC announced that it was shutting down two California-bsaed companies that used a call centre in India to defraud Americans out of more than $5 million over the last two years.

Nasscom president R Chandrasekhar believes that the current scam is nothing to do with the BPM industry but is a scam of the growing digital world. “Unfortunately these scams are part of the growing digital world and part of the Dark web rather than an industry issue. We however are working closely with enforcement agencies in India and outside in identifying such issues and taking action immediately,” he added.

The other problem that the industry faces is no control on small call centres that keep mushrooming in the country. “We have several mom-and-pop kind of establishment doing call centre work. They generally approach large or mid-sized firm and ask for sub-contracting work. Though the number of such players have come down when compared to the ealry days of BPM industry, but they are still a significant number and these potentially can use the data shared with them wrongfully,” said an industry player on condition of anonymity.

IRS SCAM

• IRS scam has been used to dupe US citizens for last three years
   
• In 2015, 3,000 individuals were duped under a similar scam; about $15.5 mn were collected by scammers
   
• Hari Om IT Park, Universal Outsourcing services and Oswal House were the three firms that Thane Police raided
   
• The Mumbai call centres demanded $10,000-20,000 and later settled for $5,000-3,000
   
• A total of Rs 500 crore were siphoned off from US citizens by the recent scammers
   
• Data of US citizens were provided by one of the owners of the companies who is based in the US