America
Indian-American ringleader of tax phone scam gets 15 years jail
By
Arun KumarWashington, July 9
The Indian-American
ringleader of a massive "call centre" fraud scam that collected more
than $1 million by impersonating FBI and tax department officials has
been sentenced to nearly 15 years in jail.
Besides 175 months in
prison, Sahil Patel, who organised the US side of the extortion ring run
out of call centres in India, was also ordered to forfeit $1 million,
and sentenced to three years of supervised release, the US Attorney's
Office in the southern district of New York announced on Wednesday.
Patel
whose scam operation bilked $1.2 million out of US taxpayers, pleaded
guilty in January 2015 before US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who
imposed the sentence Wednesday.
"The nature of this crime robbed
people of their identities and their money in a way that causes people
to feel they have been almost destroyed," Hellerstein said.
English-speaking
workers in the Indian call centres would impersonate IRS and FBI agents
in phone calls to victims and threaten them with arrest and financial
penalties if they did not send money using pre-paid cards.
"Sahil
Patel's elaborate scheme involved impersonating law enforcement
officers and using intimidation and fear to bilk over a million dollars
from hundreds of unsuspecting victims," said Manhattan's Indian-American
US Attorney Preet Bharara.
According to court documents, from
December 2011 through the day of his arrest on December 18, 2013, Patel
participated in the "sophisticated scheme".
Armed with long
lists of potential victims, referred to by Patel and his co-conspirators
as "lead sheets", India-based callers systematically placed thousands
of calls to individuals in the US in the hopes of intimidating the call
recipients into providing a payment to the co-conspirators.
Patel
and his co-conspirators also used several layers of wire transactions
in order to conceal the destination and nature of the extorted payments,
which totalled at least $1.2 million.
Tax-related phone scams
have been rampant in the past two years with the Treasury Inspector
General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to date receiving about 600,000
reports of people receiving threatening phone calls from criminals
impersonating IRS agents, according to CNN.
It continues to log
an additional 9,000 to 12,000 every week. Close to 4,000 of the people
who have received such calls have lost more than $20 million, with a
typical loss per call of $5,000 to $7,000, a TIGTA official was quoted
as saying.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])