Mumbai: The Thane police have busted a racket in which telecallers were calling American citizens posing as agents of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and duping them into paying ‘fines’ for ‘tax irregularities’.
The police have arrested 70 people, while 700 are under the scanner.
The racket was detected after the police got a tip-off about the operation in Mira Road. A team of 40 officers and 120 constables carried raided three buildings.
“Telephonic conversations via Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) facility were being made when we conducted the raids” said Thane Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh. “We also found recordings of calls made to U.S. citizens in the buildings, which were being run like call centres. A total of 772 people were taken into custody.”
Explaining the details, Mr. Singh said the people behind the scam bought contact details of U.S. citizens in bulk, and then “the callers would call the targets and claim to be from the IRS. They would then tell the targets that some irregularities had been detected in their tax payments, that they had become defaulters, that they would be booked and would face imprisonment for at least three months. Once a target believed them, the callers would start talking about payment of fines. After an amount agreeable to both parties was reached, the targets would be asked to pay via international gift cards or iTunes.”
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Parag Manere said, “Eight out of 10 times the targets would not believe the callers and [would] hang up. But even if only a handful of people paid the ‘fines’ every day, the accused were still making thousands of dollars from each target.”
According to inquiries so far, the racket has been active for around a year, and the accused are believed to have cheated thousands of U.S. citizens to the tune of hundreds of crores of rupees. The police are still trying to get an estimate of the amount.
After preliminary inquiries, the police identified 70 of the detained suspects as those who were heading the racket and placed them under arrest. The rest are still being questioned.
The accused have been booked under the Indian Penal Code, the Information Technology Act, and the Indian Telegraph Act. The police have seized hard drives and computers, which will now be examined.
Officials said a large number of the other suspects are young men and women, who were trained to speak in an American accent and familiarised with legal terms before being put to work.
Contact details racket
The police also launched a separate investigation into the source of the contact details used. Officials said that gangs that contact details from sources within telemarketing and other corporate companies, which are sold illegally on the black market. “Such data is available for a price if you know the right people ,” a senior police official said. “According to our information, such data is obtained from all over the world and even classified as per demographic or other parameters, so that those looking for a specific set of targets to cheat or otherwise exploit can only pay for contact details of such targets.”
