Cyber scam: Digital arrest of Americans sitting in India

Digital Desk

On Sunday afternoon, a 58-year-old European citizen received a call. The caller identified himself as an official of the American financial services company 'Charles Schwab and claimed to be involved in an international investigation, stating that there had been suspicious transactions in his account and that he could be arrested if he did not cooperate immediately.

In a panic, the victim sent money through gift cards and digital vouchers as per the process described by the caller. After this, $40,000 disappeared from his account within a few hours. The ED has received several cases of citizens of other countries being digitally arrested and defrauded by India.

The fraud targeting foreigners was being operated from the call centres that were raided on Tuesday. ED sources said that agents of the gang in these centres were trained to speak with a foreign accent. They were made to memorise sentences through scripts. A multi-channel route is used to extract money. Wallet-rotation, mixing, and off-ramp services are used to make fund tracing difficult.

The investigation has revealed that cyber fraud in India is now changing into an 'outsourcing model', where professional agents target foreign nationals. In this case, the fraud gang was only defrauding people from America and Europe. They used to call them during the day according to their time, because at that time it was night in Indian Standard Time. Call centers in India remain active from midnight to morning, so that callers appear available during normal working hours in Western countries and suspicion is reduced.

The accused first used to call foreign nationals, claiming to be customer support for companies like Charles Schwab Financial Services, Microsoft, and Apple. Then they would try to trap them by citing fake cases. When they agreed to pay, the accused would take money from them via gift cards or pay vouchers. Then they would convert it into cryptocurrency. After that, the amount would be mixed through 'off-chain' exchanges and private wallets and sent to India. The ED has tracked several such wallets where transactions worth millions of US dollars are recorded.

The focus of this case is now not just on the criminals, but also on the weaknesses of the system. It is being assessed how insecure international payment channels are for such scams and whether India should introduce separate monitoring protocols for crypto exchanges. Currently, the investigating agency is now searching for those servers, hard drives, and crypto wallet addresses from which the financial flow can be mapped.

New Delhi. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday raided 15 places in Delhi, Gurugram, Noida and Mumbai. This action was taken in a money laundering case related to a fake call centre. These centres are accused of defrauding foreign nationals of millions of dollars. The investigation revealed that a person named Karan Verma, along with some others, was running fake call centres in Rohini, Paschim Vihar and Rajouri Garden in Delhi.

The ED Chandigarh unit seized property worth ₹2.85 crore of two accused who defrauded Americans. The two had defrauded him of ₹11.50 crores online.