US cracks down on robocalls mostly originating from India
WASHINGTON: The US has initiated legal action in a landmark development against telecom companies that allowed hundreds of millions of fraud phone calls from abroad, mostly originating in India, that targeted the elderly and vulnerable for extortion.
The US department of justice filed two civil action lawsuits in a federal court in New York Tuesday seeking temporary restraining orders against five US telecom companies and three individuals who are alleged to have allowed these calls—the callers used threats of arrest or jail for trumped up crimes and offenses to extort money—into the United States. They are accused of being “gateway carriers” of phone calls over the Internet (Voice Over Internet Protocol—or VoIP) despite repeated warnings.
No Indian entity or individual was named, but authorities traced most of the calls to India. One of the companies named in the complaint carried, for instance, 182 million of these calls from a single “India-based VOIP carrier conspirator”, according to one of the two complaints, during May and June in 2019.
US authorities have previously prosecuted many Indians and those of Indian descent in relation to these scams—21 of them were sentenced in a single case in 2018, for instance. More than 30 people were named as conspirators in India in the same case, that also involved five Indiabased call-centers.
Indian authorities have cooperated in the crackdown with raids and arrests in India. Announcing the lawsuits, Assistant attorney general Jody Hunt said, “We look forward to working closely with law enforcement colleagues in India and elsewhere around the world to identify those behind these calls so that we can bring them to justice”.
US investigators have identified at least six types of scams conducted through these robocalls: extort victims with the threat of arrest or jail for fake income tax fraud; get them to transfer money for safekeeping because their Social Security Number was compromised; help with tech support; demand fines for incomplete immigration document or related lapses; make victims pay a fee for clearing some hurdle in the way of pre-approved loans; and paying off foreign government law enforcement pursuing some case.
Investigators had been focussed thus far on the network of people who collected the extorted amounts in the US and their recipients in India, or some other off-shore location. The lawsuits announced Tuesday mark a significant shift in the crackdown to focus on their US-based facilitators.
“We are using all available tools and resources to stop foreign call center scammers — and for the first time their US-based enablers — from conning elderly and vulnerable victims in New York and throughout the United States,” said Richard Donoghue, the lead federal prosecutor as US attorney.