U.S. Authorities Charge 6 Indian Call Centers Scamming Thousands of Americans

A number of India-based call centers and their directors have
been indicted for their alleged role in placing tens of millions of
scam calls aimed at defrauding thousands of American consumers.

The indictment charged Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar
Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh
Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki and their respective call
centers for conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E
Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to
U.S. citizens.

“Criminal India-based call centers defraud U.S. residents,
including the elderly, by misleading victims over the telephone
utilizing scams such as Social Security and IRS impersonation as
well as loan fraud,” the U.S. Justice Department said^[1]
in a release.

According to the November 2020 indictment^[2] issued against E Sampark
and Gupta, the calls from India-based phone scammers led to
reported losses of over $20 million from May 2015 to June 2020,
with the company maintaining roughly 60 servers in the U.S. state
of Florida for this purpose and which contained over 130,000
recordings of scam calls.

The scheme involved the callers posing as Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) employees to dupe the victims into transferring
money, threatening them with arrest and fines should they fail to
pay back taxes. The illegally amassed funds were then laundered
through an overseas fraud network.

As part of the Social Security scam, the fraudsters purported to
be federal agents in an attempt to mislead victims into believing
that their Social Security numbers (SSN) were involved in crimes
and once again applied intimidation tactics to trick them into
sending cash.

Lastly, the callers also masqueraded as people working for
lending institutions and informed the affected parties that they
were eligible for fictitious loans, only to direct them to “pay
upfront fees to demonstrate their ability to repay the loan” in
exchange for nothing.

“Scam robocalls cause emotional and financial devastation to
victims, particularly our vulnerable and elderly populations,” said
U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine in a statement. “These India-based call
centers allegedly scared their victims and stole their money,
including some victims’ entire life savings.”