Last Updated on 05/02/2022 by Nidhi Khandelwal
A number of call centers in India, as well as their directors, have been charged with placing tens of millions of scam calls targeted at scamming thousands of Americans.
Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki, and their call centers were charged with conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to U.S. citizens, according to the indictment.
According to the indictment filed against E Sampark and Gupta in November 2020, calls from India-based phone scammers resulted in reported losses of more than $20 million between May 2015 and June 2020, with the company maintaining roughly 60 servers in the U.S. state of Florida for this purpose, containing over 130,000 recordings of scam calls.
The callers pretended to be Internal Revenue Service (IRS) personnel in order to trick the victims into transferring money by threatening them with arrest and fines if they did not pay back taxes. The ill-gotten gains were subsequently laundered through an international fraud ring.
In the case of the Social Security scam, the con artists pretended to be federal agents in order to dupe victims into believing that their Social Security numbers (SSNs) were being used in criminal activity, and then used intimidation methods to get them to send money.
Finally, the callers pretended to be from financial organizations and told victims they were approved for bogus loans, only to demand that they “pay upfront fees to establish their ability to repay the loan” in exchange for nothing.
