Over the past three years, at least 10,000 immigrants, U.S. citizens, and elderly people have fallen victim to frightening phone calls from individuals posing as law enforcement and federal immigration officials — and demanding money to prevent them or a loved one from getting deported.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it would charge 61 individuals for a transnational scheme involving scammers in the United States and in India that targeted a disproportionate number of Southeast Asian immigrants in an effort to extort them out of millions of dollars. Many Americans were also targeted.
During some of these phone calls, an Indian call center scammer would pretend to be an Internal Revenue Services (IRS) worker to ask victims to pay back taxes. In other cases, scammers posing as immigrant agents would call victims to collect fines for faulty immigration paperwork, claiming that the failure to pay “would result in immediate deportation.” In those cases, the calls were made from numbers that made it look like they were coming straight from the Immigration Services call center.
“The criminals involved in this scheme are willing to go to frightening lengths to try to collect from the victims.”
In one extreme case, a scammer posed as a victim on a 911 call, “telling the dispatcher he was armed and wanted to kill cops.” Within minutes, “heavily armed police” were dispatched to the victim’s actual house, where his daughter was home alone. No one was ultimately hurt.
“As this scenario makes clear, the criminals involved in this scheme are willing to go to frightening lengths to try to collect from the victims,” Bruce Foucart, assistant director with Homeland Security Investigations, said at the conference.
After victims agreed to pay, call center individuals would collaborate with U.S.-based scammers to launder the extorted money by cashing out as prepaid debit cards or through wire transfers.
The Treasury Department has received “approximately two million contacts from individuals who said they have received solicitations from that number,” with more than 10,000 people saying that they had fallen victim to the scam “in the amount of $50 million,” Russell George, the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Exemption, said at the press conference.
So far, law enforcement authorities have arrested 20 people in the United States in connection with the scheme. Another 32 people and five call centers in India were also charged for their alleged involvement.
Similar fraudulent incidents have happened in the past, with call center scammers even asking victims to buy specific gift cards.
Immigrants make for especially good victims primarily because they are some of the most vulnerable people in society. Regardless of legal status, deportation remains a lingering fear that could be fulfilled at any moment with the knock of a door. Immigrants can also fall prey to people who pretend to be immigration lawyers. And immigration status, language barriers, and a fear of law enforcement agencies may prevent immigrants from reporting crimes and scams to the proper authorities.
These deportation fears aren’t wholly unfounded, either. Law enforcement officials may flag immigrants with old criminal convictions as priorities for deportation, even if those people have turned their lives around in the years and decades since.