[The
scammers told victims that their assets and bank accounts had been linked to
drug cartels and would be seized if they didn’t pay up, the authorities in
India said.]
According
to the authorities, scammers in the plot would telephone people and tell them
that their assets and bank accounts were being seized after officers from
multiple law U.S. enforcement agencies found their bank account details at
crime scenes involving drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia.
Over
4,500 Americans fell for it, the New Delhi police said on Wednesday, and
officials estimate that more than $14 million was transferred over two years.
Investigators
said the victims would be given a choice: Either face arrest or choose an
“alternative dispute resolution” option that would allow them to avoid facing
the law.
“They
were asked to buy Bitcoins or Google gift cards worth all the money in their
accounts,” said Anyesh Roy, a police officer in New Delhi. The money was then
transferred to what the victims were told was “a safe government wallet” but
that actually belonged to the scammers.
Call
centers are part of India’s expansive outsourcing industry, which generates
about $28 billion in annual revenue and employs roughly 1.2 million people. At
the same time, the country has emerged as a hot spot for online fraud in which
perpetrators are rarely punished.
Cases
have become so common in recent years that the Indian authorities have
dedicated special units to dealing with the problem.
In
August, the police in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon raided a call center and
arrested over two dozen people suspected of being involved in cheating
over 30,000 Americans by putting malware onto their
computers and then offering to fix them for a price.
The
call center employees sent countless links to pornographic websites to people
across the United States, the police said. When the links were clicked, the
users’ computer systems would be bugged. The scammers would then direct the
users to buy iTunes gift cards or charge them up to $700 each to debug the
computers, according to the police.
The
authorities have carried out raids across India and arrested hundreds of
people, from boiler
rooms in New Delhi, a hub of the global call-center industry, to the
suburbs of Mumbai, where cons impersonating Internal Revenue Service officials
have demanded
payments to cover back taxes.
When
the police arrived at the call center in West Delhi on Wednesday, they said,
they soon realized that it was one of the biggest operations they had seen in
recent months.
The
scammers were trained to speak with American accents and told to read from a
vetted script, the police said. One officer investigating the case said that
those involved were adept at making people quickly succumb to their demands and
were rewarded with extra cash.
Investigators
said that the leader of the call center, an Indian man based in Dubai, had also
been involved in a similar previous case but had fled the United Arab Emirates
before he could be detained. They said that he had paid those working at the
call center $400 to $500 a month and that many of his employees were teenagers.
Rakshit
Tandon, a cybersecurity expert, said that Indian scammers hardly worked in
isolation, and that in each case investigators typically found a sleeper
partner, either in the country where the victims live or in places where data
can be leaked from other parts of the world.
As
India plunges into an economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Mr.
Tandon said it was likely that more call-center crimes will be reported in the
coming months, with a huge surge in unemployment and few jobs for educated
young people.
“We
have trained and cheap manpower available,” he said. “Employees know they are
cheating, but they still do it for extra money.”
