We threaten them. Once they feel the fear, they pay ...inside cruel conmen’s HQ
INSIDE a dirt-grey block in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, a cheery young man wearing a headset places a call to a pensioner in north London.
‘Sir, this is Matthew and I’m calling you from HMRC. How are you doing today?’
The elderly gentleman replies politely before call centre ‘ worker’ Samkit Jain gets straight to business. ‘Sir, we just wanted to know if you received the yellow slip regarding your case? Your case for tax fraud.’
It is 4,250 miles from this northern Indian city, where Mahatma Gandhi led his peaceful campaign for independence, to the leafy suburbs of London. Yet the panicked shrieks of Jain’s elderly, vulnerable victim rang out as if he were in the room next door.
desperately, the pensioner pleaded with Jain to contact the accountant who dealt with his tax affairs. As the call concluded, the fraudster gave a satisfied smile. ‘Yeah, he was scared,’ Jain said.
This is the modern face of call centre crime: An almost untraceable network of Indian gangsters preying on tens of thousands of British victims a day using only a laptop, a headset and the BT phonebook. It is hardly sophisticated, but deadly effective.
I became the first journalist to infiltrate these booming, illicit businesses, and discovered the astonishing riches being brazenly plundered from British taxpayers.
Posing as a businessman interested in forging a partnership with the criminals, I met a gang of young men at the forefront of a banking fraud crimewave that has left the authorities scrambling to act.
My cover story was that I had access to financial information regarding potential British victims which I could provide the gang, but first I wanted to see how the scam worked.
Outwardly charming and polite, the fraudsters imitate the officers of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs using accents learned from Hollywood movies. By targeting up to 10,000 British people a day, telling them they face arrest for failing to pay enough tax, the 18 scammers share spoils of over £1million a year: Every penny of it stolen from terrified British taxpayers.
As one of the cynical fraudsters boasted to me with a broad grin: ‘We threaten them. Once they feel the fear, they’re Fleeced: The fraudulent call centre above a Panasonic shop gonna pay.’ The men I spoke to dressed in electric blue said they usually have about trainers, denim jeans and an five ‘hits’ a night, making an open-neck checked shirt, a average of £5,000 – but sometimes multi- coloured macrame far more. They boasted bracelet round his wrist, Soni of colleagues who made welcomed me with an enthusiastic £200,000 in a single day from handshake, saying: ‘Good one unfortunate victim. to see you, man.’
With returns this high, should Proudly, he took me through we be surprised that one in ten the details of the scam. On of all British fraud cases now average, he said, they target originate in India? 10,000 Britons a day with an
The gang at the forefront of automated message informing this frightening new goldrush them there is a case against had a deceptively simple setup. them for non-payment of tax, They gathered in a bare telling the victim they must room overlooking a bustling call back to discuss it. road, with laptops open on Soni then scrolled through plain wooden tables. potential victims in London on
A muscle-bound graduate his laptop, the familiar BT named Krishna Borah logo popping up at the top appeared to be the gang’s de of the screen. facto boss. Borrowing corporate ‘It’s the British phone book,’ language, he introduced his fellow closer, Samkit Jain, me to one of his star performers: explained. ‘We randomly select A ‘closer’ called Sandeep any surnames or first names Soni whose job is to extract and then just call them.’ cash from customers – as they Calls are made from the computer, euphemistically call their victims. and Jain showed me
‘Share spoils of over £1m a year’
how they use software to make it appear they are calling from the UK. On the day I visited, they had stolen a genuine HMRC number to show up as their caller ID.
‘ You can simply Google the number,’ Jain explained when I asked how he had got it. ‘Whatever you wanna display. I can even display your number.’
For the demonstration, they decided to cold call victims directly to show how easily they can be intimidated. Soni plugged in his headset and called a number in Pimlico, central London.
When a man answered, he instantly switched from his heavily accented English to a Western intonation and said: ‘I’m a lawyer for the HMRC fraud division, my name is Dave Smith, badge ID 100581. Let me tell you, this call is being recorded and monitored so right now you are not able to disconnect the phone call.
‘If you disconnect the phone call, unfortunately we have to start the legal procedures by contacting the authorities, OK?’
As the call continued, Soni read from a five-page script on the laptop in front of him, which contained answers to any questions the victim might have.
The script also carries details of threats to make. For example, they tell the victim that they face charges for unpaid tax worth over £8,000, but that this could rise to over £70,000 with court costs. The script also warns that the victim’s bank account, pension and other finances will be frozen. It even goes into significant detail about how ‘non-compliance’ will lead to prosecution for violation of tax regulations. The gang admit that they don’t know what the genuine British laws are.
But no- one listening to Soni would have realised this, as he calmly but firmly asserted his fabricated authority over the unfortunate man on the phone.
When the victim challenged him, he barked back: ‘Can I have your lawyer’s information? You do have a lawyer right?’ As he was talking, Jain explained: ‘We have to keep confusing people, making them believe that this is the real thing. That’s the important part.’
This is why people hand over their money. These men catch their victims at vulnerable moments and are highly convincing, even taking their victims to the HMRC website during the call to help establish their credibility.
Soni said the key to ‘success’ was to get the victim to plead to be allowed to ‘pay back’ the nonexistent debt. ‘We don’t tell the people that we are asking for money,’ he explained.
‘We just threaten them with legal procedures… Once they feel the fear they pay directly from their side. They’re going to tell us from their side that “I want to pay and I want to resolve this.”’
Gang members said the best targets were those aged over 40, and ideally ‘old and rich’. Soni said: ‘Older people say: “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with my information? Why did the government call me?”’
In a further cynical twist, they often prey on elderly Asian immigrants with poor English – and then offer to provide a translator to talk them through what they need to do to ‘repay’ the money.
New immigrants are an easy target, as they are often less aware of how the British tax system works. The gang threatens them with deportation if they refuse to pay.
Victims are made to pay using their online bank account, and those without online banking are instructed to put cash directly into a deposit box.
Mohid Trivedi, the call centre’s office manager, explained that after terrorising victims into agreeing to pay, they sometimes have to calm them down to ensure they have received the cash. He explained: ‘We have to let the caller get some rest. We say: “Drink some water, don’t be so scared.” We say: “We have put your payment on hold. Once your payment has been made it will be resolved, so don’t worry.” It’s all about psychology.’
The utter fear that the scammers drive into the hearts of their victims is clear. Trivedi added of the victims’ desperation: ‘Some customers have sold cars and things like that to pay... they panic.’
The closers’ fake accents had an American twang, and on occasion the diction slipped as they said ‘attorney’ rather than solicitor. This, it turned out, was because, despite speaking to and cruelly tricking thousands of Britons every day, none of these call centre fraudsters had ever been to the UK.
Astonishingly, they learnt their patter from watching Hollywood films. ‘It was Bride Wars or something like that,’ explained Jain.
Ahmedabad has previously been identified as the nerve centre of an ‘enormous and complex’ Indian call centre fraud which used fake tax debts to fleece around 15,000 US citizens.
That ring was finally smashed after the US Justice Department, working with the Indian authorities, launched a crackdown and arrested scores of people.
FBI agents were back in Ahmedabad when the Mail visited last month, orchestrating a string of raids on more fake call centres around the city which led to numerous arrests and extensive coverage in the local Press.
But while US authorities are visibly trying to tackle the scourge of call centre fraud, the scammers say they have no concerns about their UK counterparts.
Asked if anyone from Britain ever tried to catch them, Jain said simply: ‘Never.’ Trivedi added that it was ‘ not possible’ to trace them because their IP address, an internet protocol that identifies the location of computers worldwide, is registered to Afghanistan.
When I spoke to the British police they insisted that they are taking steps to crack down on the gangs – but in the meantime, the money keeps rolling in, and the victims are mounting.
In the hour I was inside the fake call centre, at least three victims came under pressure to hand over their money. And it is no wonder, when bonuses of ‘ hard cash’ are paid to closers if they hit targets of ten or twenty thousand pounds.
Speaking of his motivation to keep the scam running, Soni boasted: ‘Normally I just sleep for two, three, four hours and then I start work. I just wanna make more money. There is no limit, we can get any amount in cash.’ He added of his terrified victims: ‘They’ll give you bags full of money.’
‘It’s a very big business,’ Jain added, laughing. Near the end of our demonstration, I asked him if he ever felt guilty about fleecing the elderly and vulnerable.
‘Why should I feel bad?’ he asked with a bemused smile. ‘ Money is important to life.’
‘It’s all about the psychology’