More than 20 Indian origin persons residing in the United States, have been sentenced up to 20 years in jail for their involvement in an India-based call center scam which defrauded thousands of American citizens of millions of loss.
While some convicts are sentenced for fours in prison, few are sentenced for 20 years in jail. Several of the convicted will be deported to India after the completion of their sentence.
According to the US officials, the call center scam defrauded numerous US residents of hundreds of millions of dollars.
According to the US officials, the call center scam cheating thousands of Americans. Prosecutors claimed that India based call centers used various telephonic frauds methods to cheat US residents.
According to the various admissions made in connection with the guilty pleas between 2012-2016, the defendants and their conspirators perpetrated a complex fraud and money laundering scheme in which individuals from call centers located in Ahmedabad frequently impersonated officials from the Internal Revenue Service or US citizenship and Immigration Services in a ruse designed to fleece victims located throughout America.
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Using information obtained from various resources, call centre operators targeted US victims who were threatened with arrest, fines, or imprisonment if they did not pay the alleged money owed to the government. Victims who agreed to pay the scammers were directed on how to make payments.
Once the payment was done, firms used to turn to a network of runners based in the US to obtain the extorted money by purchasing reloadable cards or retrieving wire transfers.
The indictment for the case has also charged five Indian call centres with general conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. These defendants have not yet been arraigned.
Earlier, three other Indians were sentenced for their involvement in the same fraud and money laundering scheme.
