Washington: An Indian national and three Indian-Americans have pleaded guilty to the charges of being involved in a multi-million dollar telephone impersonation fraud and money laundering scheme in the US perpetrated by India-based call centres.
According to a PTI report, Nisarg Patel, 26, of New Jersey, Dilip Kumar Ramanlal Patel, 30, of Florida and Rajesh Kumar, 39, of Arizona each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering offences.
As many as 54 individuals and five India-based call centres have been charged in the scam.
The pleas were entered before US district judge David Hittner of the Southern District of Texas.
All the accused have been charged for frauding American people through a money laundering scheme in an indictment in Southern District of Texas in October last year, the report said.
According to admissions made in connection with their respective pleas, the accused and their co-conspirators perpetrated a complex scheme in which individuals from call centres located in Ahmedabad, impersonated officials from the IRS and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and engaged in other telephone call scams, in a ruse designed to defraud victims located throughout the US.
Using information obtained from data brokers and other sources, the call center operators threatened people in the US with arrest, imprisonment, fines or deportation if they did not pay money, which the accused alleged they owed to the US government.
Victims who agreed to pay the scammers were instructed how to provide payment, including by purchasing stored value cards or wiring money.
After the payment, the call centers would immediately turn to a network of “runners” based in the US to liquidate and launder the fraudulently obtained funds, the federal investigators alleged.
In connection with his guilty plea, Nisarg admitted that beginning in around June 2013 and continuing through December 2015, he acted as a domestic runner in the criminal scheme, liquidating victim funds for conspirators from India-based call centers and organisational co-defendant ‘HGLOBAL’.
According to the PTI report, he communicated about the fraudulent scheme with various India-based co-defendants via telephone, email and WhatsApp text messaging. Dilip Kumar admitted that he to had served as a runner, liquidating victim scam funds per the instructions from his accomplices in India, who were running the fake call centres.
