Indians in US
One of the world’s leaders in call-centre business, India has also emerged over the years as home to fraudsters and scammers using the same business model to target Americans. One US law enforcement agency found Indians behind tech support — when a virus alert freezes the screen, the number to call to unlock it has been traced in many occasions to India.
“The stiff sentences imposed this week represent the culmination of the first-ever large scale, multi-jurisdiction prosecution targeting the India call centre scam industry,” said attorney general Jeff Sessions, announcing the sentencing. “This case represents one of the most significant victories to date in our continuing efforts to combat elder fraud and the victimization of the most vulnerable members of the US public.”
The elderly and recent immigrants were the preferred targets of these fraudsters. Callers from the India-based call centres would call them up impersonating as officers of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS — the American version of the Indian income tax department) or the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS — the dreaded acronym for the US agency that oversees the entry, stay and exit of foreigners).
The victims were picked from data brokers and other sources, and were sometimes old women and men or recently naturalized immigrants. The callers, trained to perfection on an American accent, “threatened (them) with arrest, imprisonment, fines or deportation if they did not pay alleged monies owed to the government”.
Most victims paid up, agreeing to one of the payments methods offered by the scammers — to buy a prepaid stored value card or by wiring money. Those arrested and charged in the US were mostly “runners”, operatives who collected the extorted money and transferred it to Indian accomplices through a different and complex set of procedures.
Here is how the US justice department broke it down. “Once a victim provided payment, the call centres turned to a network of runners based in the United States to liquidate and launder the extorted funds as quickly as possible by purchasing reloadable cards or retrieving wire transfers.
“In a typical scenario, call centres directed runners to purchase these stored value reloadable cards and transmit the unique card number to Indiabased co-conspirators who registered the cards using the misappropriated personal identifying information (PII) of U.S. citizens.
“The India-based co-conspirators then loaded these cards with scam funds obtained from victims. The runners used the stored value cards to purchase money orders that they deposited into the bank account of another person.” more popular he becomes the more such incidents would take place. In April 2017, Muslim trader Pehlu Khan was beaten to death allegedly by cow vigilantes while transporting cows purchased from Jaipur to his home in Nuh in Haryana. A group of men transporting cows in November last were reportedly attacked in the same district allegedly by cow vigilantes, resulting in the death of a man identified as Umar Mohammed. A month later, Taleem Khan, an alleged cow smuggler, was killed in a shootout with police.
The Alwar and Bharatpur region of Rajasthan is said to be hotbed of cow smuggling to alleged illegal slaughter houses in Haryana. The government has established police outposts in the area to prevent cow smuggling. Self-styled cow protection groups too are active in the region and carry out night patrols to thwart cow smuggling attempts.