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We alerted readers about the IRS Phone Scam back in the summer after receiving several calls and messages ourselves. It’s not very often that we hear about scammers getting caught, but it seems this morning, The Washington Post reported that Police in Mumbai India conducted a midnight raid of a call center and arrested 70 “employees” who were later charged with fraud, wrongful impersonation and violating the country’s Internet safety law. They were running the IRS Phone Scam that stole MILLIONS from Americans! It also looks like another call center raid in New Delhi resulted in the arrest of 6 others who were running the Tech Support Scam.

NEW DELHI — Computer-savvy criminals posing as Internal Revenue Service officers at call centers in India may have bilked unsuspecting Americans out of millions, police in India said Thursday.

Police conducted a dramatic midnight raid at a call center in the country’s commercial capital of Mumbai on Tuesday and detained 770 employees for questioning. Seventy were later charged with fraud, wrongful impersonation and violating the country’s Internet safety law.

The call centers were making more than $150,000 a day through scams that took place for a little over a year, police said.

The callers told their American victims they were conducting a “tax revision” or that they had defaulted on payments to the IRS and would then obtain their personal financial information and withdraw money from their bank accounts, according to Param Bir Singh, a senior police officer in Mumbai who led the raid.

It was one of the largest such raids in recent memory, he added.

“These are the people who bring a bad name to India’s IT industry, and it is very important to weed them out,” Singh said.

In Washington, the Internal Revenue Service declined to comment on the arrests.

More than 200 police officers descended on a tall, glass-fronted office building where the nine call centers were operating during Tuesday’s midnight raid after being tipped off by neighbors.

“It looked like a regular office building and employed a lot of young people who spoke English and had a good knowledge of computers,” Singh said. “It was a very sophisticated operation they were running.”

Meanwhile, in another call center in a suburb of New Delhi, workers allegedly duped thousands of American citizens by offering to remove a virus from their computers, police said. On Sunday, police in Noida arrested six people for running a call center that sold insurance to Indians by day, but allegedly tricked American consumers by night with fake offers of tech support to correct malware and viruses.

It was not the first time that fraudulent call centers targeting U.S. citizens have been raided in India.

Finally some good news! Now if they could only catch the money mule scammers, that would be great!

Source: The Washington Post