US indicts 52 Indians in call centre scam: All you need to know

The US. Justice Department charged 61 people and entities on Thursday with taking part in a scam involving India-based call centers where agents impersonated Internal Revenue Service, immigration and other federal officials and demanded payments for nonexistent debts.

The scam, which had operated since 2013, targeted at least 15,000 people who lost more than $300 million. Twenty Indians were arrested in the United States on Thursday, while 32 individuals and five call centers in India have been charged, the department said in a statement.

How it worked: . Callers posing as officials with the Internal Revenue Service and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement would tell unsuspecting victims on the other end that they had failed to pay taxes they owed, or that they were at risk of deportation, and a fast payment was needed to get them out of trouble.

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said at a news conference that the United States will be seeking the extradition of those based in India and warned others engaged in similar schemes."It's really important for the scammers in India to know that the United States is looking at this, is watching them and they could, if they engage in that activity, be extradited to the United Sates and could sit in jail ... for several years," she said.

Here is everything you need to know: 

1.The extraction scheme scared Americans into paying nonexistent tax dues through threatening phone call. sing information obtained from data brokers and other sources, call centre operators allegedly called potential victims in the US and impersonated officials from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

2. The scam was primarily run out of a network of call centres in Ahmedabad.The five Ahmedabad-based call centres that made calls to people living in the US are Hglobal, Call Mantra, Worldwide Solution, Zoriion Communications and Sharma BPO Services.

3.The US Senate Aging Committee, that studies issues related to older Americans, received more than 1,100 calls from senior citizens across the country on its fraud hotline in 2015.The most common complaint reported to the fraud hotline continues to be the IRS impersonation scam.

4  United States will be seeking the extradition of those based in India and warned others engaged in similar schemes.

5. The indictment accuses the U.S. arm of the network of grabbing the cash off the prepaid cards and then laundering the money. If victims agreed to pay, the call centres would turn to a network of US-based co-conspirators to liquidate and launder the extorted funds by purchasing prepaid debit cards  which were often registered with misapproporiated information. The second method used were wire transfers which were directed by the criminal associates using fake names and fraudulent identifications. 

6. The call centers also ran scams in which victims were offered short-term loans or grants on condition of providing good-faith deposits or payment of a processing fee.

7. The case involves more than 15,000 victims and more than $300 million in stolen money. Authorities said the bust was the largest single domestic law enforcement action yet in this scam.

8.The names and personal information of the potential targets were purchased through data brokers. "Runners" would then be responsible for retrieving the payments of the scammed funds and then depositing them in bank accounts. The callers would use information about their victims they learned through the internet to present a facade of authenticity, and the number that appeared on a caller ID seemed to come from a legitimate US government agency.

9. The justice department said this network was busted in a three-year-long investigation. The indictment was returned by a grand jury in a Texas court on October 19, following which arrests were made.

10.  The justice department also found evidence of the use of  “hawala” of illegal money transfer.

According to several reports,  an 85-year-old woman of California was conned into paying $12,300 by one of the call centres for some “fictitious tax violations”. 

With inputs from Agencies