[Officials accuse Mr. Thakkar of leveraging India’s vast supply of tech-savvy, English-speaking workers and modern communications technology to earn as much as $150,000 a day at the height of the fraud.]
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Police
officials escorting Sagar Thakkar, who is accused of running a lucrative
Internal Revenue
Service call center scam, to a police station in Thane, on
the outskirts of
Mumbai, India, on Saturday.
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MUMBAI
— The police on Saturday
detained a 24-year-old man suspected of running a multimillion-dollar fraud
from a network of Indian call centers, tricking hundreds of unwitting Americans
into believing they owed money to the Internal Revenue Service.
Sagar Thakkar, known as Shaggy, was
apprehended by immigration officials in Mumbai after arriving on a flight from
Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where the police said he had been living
since a raid on his call centers in October. He was charged with extortion,
cheating by impersonation and wire fraud, and is expected to remain in custody
until April 15.
Mr. Thakkar’s lawyer could not be reached on
Saturday.
Officials accuse Mr. Thakkar of leveraging
India’s vast supply of tech-savvy, English-speaking workers and modern
communications technology to earn as much as $150,000 a day at the height of
the fraud.
Many of Mr. Thakkar’s nearly 700 young
employees would call United States citizens, impersonate I.R.S. agents and
demand immediate payment for unpaid taxes. The police estimated that he may
have bilked Americans out of $100 million dollars over the telephone.
The police have been hunting for Mr. Thakkar
since the call center raid last year. They believe an informer tipped him off
to the raid, said Abhishek Trimukhe, deputy commissioner of police in Thane.
Mr. Thakkar’s lavish fugitive lifestyle has
intrigued Indian crime reporters, who chronicled his purchase of a $400,000
German sports car from one of India’s most famous cricket players as a gift for
his girlfriend.
Investigators said that Mr. Thakkar had
recruited former schoolmates for the fraud by driving them in limousines and
hosting them at opulent restaurants.
“He appears like a regular guy; he doesn’t
appear like a criminal if you talk to him,” said Param Bir Singh, Thane’s
police commissioner. “But very, very tech-savvy and very, very smart.”
Mr. Thakkar spent the past six months in
Dubai. He told the police he lived there using a residential permit, which he
claimed was linked to a Dubai-based shell company. He returned to India of his
own volition, perhaps because he had run out of money, Mr. Trimukhe said. He
returned to India with no luggage, carrying only two mobile phones and travel
documents, the police said.
In conversations with the police, Mr. Thakkar
described himself as the child of a lower-middle class family from Gujarat who
made his first foray into call-center work at 15, carrying out customer phone
surveys about buying and selling cars, and then selling those leads to
automotive retailers.
He learned about call-center swindles a few
years later from friends, and decided to replicate the model on a large scale,
enlisting dozens of school friends, Mr. Trimukhe said.
“His entire family was in Ahmedabad and
they’re lower middle class; I don’t think they really needed it,” Mr. Trimukhe
said. “He wanted fast money. There is no other intention for this. In Ahmedabad
there is a culture of business, they want to earn big money.”
The police said on Saturday that they were
confident their actions had “heavily dented” the illegal call-center industry.
“Mr. Thakkar has shared that there were many
call centers running in the country, which after our raid have shut down,” Mr.
Singh said.
The police said they were scouring Mr.
Thakkar’s phones for information, but that he had disposed of the iPhone he had
used to run the fraud. They said they had found only a handful of contacts and
no trace of his past communications on his new phones.
Ellen Barry contributed reporting.
