New Delhi: Police in New Delhi have said they have arrested more than 50 people involved in a call-center scheme on the pretext that the victims had their assets frozen as part of an extensive drug investigation. The victims were convinced that they would have to transfer money to scammers or risk going to jail.
According to officials, the conspiracy theorists will call and say that their assets and bank accounts were seized by several U.S. enforcement agency officials after their bank account details were found on crime scenes involving drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia.
More than 4,500,000 Americans fell for it, New Delhi Police said on Wednesday, and officials estimate that more than 14 million transfers have been made in two years.
Investigators said victims would be given a choice: either face arrest or choose an “alternative dispute resolution” option that would prevent them from facing the law.
“They were asked to buy Bitcoins or a Google Gift Card with all the money in their account,” said Anyesh Roy, a New Delhi police officer. The money that was then transferred to the victims was called “safe government wallet” but it really belongs to the scammers.
Call centers are part of India’s vast outsourcing industry, generating about 28 28 billion in annual revenue and employing about 1.2 million people. At the same time, the country has emerged as a hot spot for fraudline online fraud in which criminals are rarely punished.
Cases have become so common in recent years that Indian authorities have dedicated special units to deal with the problem.
In August Gust, police raided a call center in Gurgaon’s Delhi suburb and arrested more than two dozen people on suspicion of defrauding 20,000,000 Americans by placing malware on their computers and then offering to charge a price.
Call center employees sent numerous links to pornographic websites to people in the United States, police said. When the links were clicked, users’ computer systems would be bugged. According to police, scammers will direct users to buy iTunes gift cards or charge $ 700 each to debug a computer.
Authorities have carried out raids across India and demanded payments to cover back from the boiler room in New Delhi, a suburb of Mumbai, where Internal Revenue Service officials have demanded payments. Tax.
When police arrived at the call center in West Delhi on Wednesday, they said they soon realized it was one of the largest operations they had seen in recent months.
The scammers were trained to speak with American accents and read from the script they were investigating, police said. An official investigating the case said the people involved were quick to fall victim to the demands of the people and gave them extra cash.
Investigators said the call center leader, an Indian based in Dubai, was also involved in the same case earlier, but fled the UAE before being detained. They said they paid 400 to $ 500 a month to people working in the call center and many of its employees were teenagers.
Rakshit Tandon, a cybersecurity expert, said Indian scammers rarely work in isolation, and investigators in each case are usually assigned to the country where the victims live or to places where data could be leaked from other parts of the world. .
As India plunged into an economic crisis due to the coronavirus epidemic, Mr Tandon said it was likely that more call-center crimes would be reported in the next two months, with a sharp rise in unemployment and few jobs for educated youth.
“We have trained and affordable manpower available,” he said. “Employees know they’re cheating, but they still do it for extra money.”
