In a nice bit of scammer news, a man by the name of Sagar Thakkar was arrested in Mumbai as the suspected leader of a ring of IRS phone scammers. I’ve covered a few of these scams before, where people are cold-called out of nowhere and told that they owe some extremely high amount in backed taxes, and that they must pay immediately or face arrest.
The problem with these scams, and the part that makes me question how anyone falls for them is 1: The thick Indian accents should be a dead give away and 2: They always want people to pay using gift cards of some kind, rather than via a check.
Still, it would seem that, according to reports, thousands of people, usually older people, fall for these scams each year, sending in total via one method or another millions of dollars to the scammers. Obviously, when you combine the values being stolen from innocent people, and the claims of government affiliation being as high a crime as they are, it makes sense that there is finally a concerted effort to shut these guys down, and while I wish there was an equal focus on tech support scams, this is at least a start. A damn good one.
It’s a sad situation that the economic status of India, on a whole, makes these call center scams such a viable method of employment – some people just can’t find anything else for employment, or they take the job thinking it’s a typical call center only to discover that it’s a scam later. Some even believe they are doing honest work, as they don’t know computers well enough to even realize the lies they are telling! To those people, I do have sympathy, but wish that upon being told they are involved in a scam they would take the better option and leave the job, and educate others to never take such jobs. Too bad that’s easier said than done…
Still, as for IRS scammers, and the people making the calls, I’m damned certain every last one of them knows they are lying, and for them, I have no forgiveness. I feel the people of India shouldn’t either, as these criminals are giving their nation a terrible reputation. There are reasons Americans don’t like to hear an Indian on the line when they make a business call, and it isn’t just a matter of not being able to understand them or some inherent racism – India isn’t see as a “stable” nation, and a heavy influence in this perception is the fact that these scams keep on going. Sadly, India isn’t seen as all that good of place to many people here, which I’m certain is a generally incorrect presumption that isn’t helped by these scams.
Still, thankfully, forces are massing up against scammers in all ways, and maybe soon this will mostly be a thing of the past. With education and awareness in the states and a strong effort to arrest these criminals in India, we can soon see an end to at least India-based phone scams!
Good job in getting this guy behind bars, regardless. That’s one more person, and hopefully one more web of scams taken out of the loop.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-fraud-usa-arrests-idUSKBN17A05V