Over the past two weeks, Indian police have been bursting into suspected illegal call centres, arresting everyone in sight and seizing troves of equipment used to carry out phone fraud aimed at foreigners. Police say they arrested 28 people in just one of their sweeps, including two seen as the kingpins of the operation. Most are in their twenties.
Dozens of scam centres are believed to still be active in multiple cities across India, each with independent managers and using their own technology to evade detection.
In Canada, their version of the IRS is the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), and the Indian scammers have been hitting taxpayers heavily. It works like this:
The CRA scam, just one of the criminal schemes operated from the centres, typically begins with a robocall claiming to be from the CRA and telling the recipient that they owe taxes. The target is informed that they must call back — or face arrest and imprisonment.
Call spoofing technology is used to make it appear the number is in Canada, and sometimes even originating from a legitimate CRA contact centre. Those who call back are subjected to further threats, but then offered a one-time chance to pay and settle the matter. Thousands of Canadians have done exactly that over the past several years, at an estimated cost of more than $10 million, falling prey to the dozens of call centres using the same scheme.
Eh, they also target Americans, pretending they're from the IRS, but the format's the same. Personally, I use NoMoRobo, which really cuts down on the robocalls. The victims who fall for this scam are generally older people or recent immigrants, of course. One good rule of thumb is to bear in mind that revenue agencies in the US and Canada rarely call - they send letters if they believe there's a problem. If one receives a call purporting to be from IRS or CRA, it's likely a scammer.
The bulk of the call centres operate in Mumbai, India's largest metropolis.
And naturally, in some case, the police are involved in them; a little extra money goes a long way when it comes to limiting operational difficulties.