US DoJ charges 6 Indian call centers for scamming Americans

Scammers indicted for defrauding, impersonating banks, IRS, SSA, and other institutions

Indian call centers charged for scamming thousands of Americans

US authorities charge Indian call centers and directors due to the allegations of scamming thousands of Americans. These potential scammers made tens of millions of scam calls to people with the purpose of defrauding them.^[1] The Department of Justice released the indictment^[2] that names Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki for their call centers. Conspiracy with questionable VoIP provider E Sampark and Guarav Gupta allowed the group to scam US citizens.

These scammers managed to pose as federal agents and mislead victims into believing that their social security numbers were used in crime. In these campaigns, people behind the call posed as IRS employees and claimed that victims needed to pay owed taxes. Call centers state the risk of arrests and encourage people to send the money.

Based on misrepresentations made during the calls, the victims, including a number of Georgia residents, mailed money to a network of individuals who allegedly laundered funds on behalf of the overseas fraud network.

Another part of the campaign involved loan scams^[3] where callers mislead Americans into getting the loan from supposed lending institutions. Scammers directed victims to pay upfront fees to confirm their ability to pay back the loan. Callers even managed to get bank account information from victims to fake the deposit of funds into victims' accounts.

Relation with previously indicted team

The indictment mentioned the previously charged Gupta. Back in November 2020, the indictment was issued against E Sampark and the director.^[4] Indian-based phone scammers led to losses of over 20 million dollars from May 2015 to June 2020. These campaigns happened because the company managed 60 servers in the US for the purpose of scamming citizens. Those servers also contained at least 130 000 recordings of said scam calls.

These scammers that got charged now, managed to trick people into believing that those claims are true and intimidating tactics helped Indian callers make a profit. People paid those fees for loan people and employees of the agencies and scammers then got money from people and transferred them using git cards and wire transfer.

Scam robocalls cause emotional and financial devastation to victims, particularly our vulnerable and elderly populations

Scams are becoming a bigger threat nowadays

Scams of various types are common and still popular. Especially technical support scams where people claim to offer help for virus-infected machines. These pages appear on the screen out of nowhere and often trigger pop-ups with names of legitimate companies, software developers, AV tool providers. Scammers behind these campaigns often rely on false claims, deceptive detection results and ask people to call them or contact alleged technicians via different platforms.

There were many instances when the same Department of Justice charged scammers for tech support campaigns. Indian-based companies often are responsible for these attacks too. Tech support scams can lead to major issues with the machine because instead of getting the help they need for the threat removal, victims receive additional RATs or more dangerous malware.^[5]

Often these scam campaigns involve payment transfers, so people get tricked into providing money or their own banking information. Sometimes both when technicians require payments and also releases keystroke logging malware that records online banking credentials to steal more money than it was asked at first.

Experts note that any suspicious pop-ups and alerts from the random page, not the system, should indicate scam behavior. As for the payment options that criminals choose, note that gift cards are not for payments. Strangers can pose as legitimate businesses or agencies, but payments demanded in gift cards is the only method used by criminals. Law enforcement, government employees, would never ask to pay taxes in the form of a gift card.