Pair of Khan Artists Confess to Sham-si Government Agency and Tech Support Racket

A month ago a pair of Indian nationals -- punks, really -- apparently got cornered for wire fraud by the DoJ after helping to manage multiple familiar impostor scams throughout the first half of 2020. This while the rest of us honest folk were being introduced to the many economic and social compromises made in a viral pandemic. Ages 22 and 24 respectively, Zeeshan Khan and Maaz Ahmed Shamsi pled guilty in New Jersey to supporting their little empire via Indian call centers. Reportedly they cleared $618K and two bits in payments wired from victims before the Feds caught up with them.

These mongrels put two faces on the often ludicrous, and always infuriating, automated threat calls we should all have heard of or experienced by now. As the court docs put it, "the robocalls purported to be from a U.S. government or law enforcement agency -- e.g., the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation -- and conveyed alarming messages ..."

You know them. Sing 'em with me now .... "The very second you receive this message you need to leave your work aside", your Social Security "Dee-paht-ment" number was "suspended", it's left "suspicious trails of information", it's connected to a criminal case, you're about to get "arrr-resh-ted", we have a "non-bailable warrant" .... CHORUS GIRLS!

Victims desperate to buy their way out of prison were instructed to send piles of cash to an address controlled by the fraud gang, "supposedly belonging to a law enforcement or government agency". These were serious payouts, as listed by exhibit, anywhere from five grand to $58,540 a parcel. Recipient money mules often relied on phony IDs to fetch and process the booty through what looks like nine different banks.

The front end of their fake tech support side hustle we know too well: "... either a pop-up window appeared on the victim's computer displaying a phone number to call for "internet technical support services;" or the victim received a telemarketing call informing the victim that their previously purchased anti-virus software was ... not sufficient for the victim's computer and, as a result, they were entitled to a refund."

Once the fake tech gained remote access to the mark's system, the promised refund was promptly issued without their spending a dime. Sorcery, you say? No, just plain misdirection and illusion, of the sort Harry Houdini would have gladly busted in his day. The call center crook merely leveraged the compromised computer to move funds between the victim's own bank accounts, normally placing a fat new balance in the checking account.

Anybody smell where this is going yet? The DoJ then explains that "the conspirator(s) advised the victim they were mistakenly overpaid -- which the victim believed given the higher balance in their checking account -- and convinced the victim that they must send the money back via wire transfer and/or cash in the mail". Cheese and crackers! Another variant of the Check Overpayment Scheme, played out in real time before the softened target has a chance to grasp what's happening.

We've another three months to wait for sentencing. What can our contestants win, Don Pardo? "The conspiracy to commit wire fraud charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine or twice the amount of the loss, whichever is greatest." ... (furiously knuckling Casio calculator) ... That's $1,236,000.46 on the outside.

I'd said two faces were painted here. These two had other partners. How many and how far flung we're not told. How many more marks got soaked we don't know. Who wrote the software and orchestrated the call blasts, we have to wait for the Winter. For all we know it was a turnkey operation. Those exist, you know, for telephone-based fraud schemes. Anything you want, I wager ... zeroed credit card APR, vehicle service contracts, medical insurance broker, phantom payday loan debt. They're part of tradition now, part of the fun of owning a phone. Someone else has done all the hard setup work, the next Khans and Shams just plug in and bring their own wheelbarrows to the cash fountain. But that's another essay.

Two Men Admit Receiving over $500,000 in Global Robocall Scam that Defrauded Elderly Victims - press release, Department of Justice, District of New Jersey

Always nice to read about criminals getting caught.

Sounds like these two are pretty well cornered and in the US. Maybe they will flip on some others; that would be nice. Some of the scam busters with YT Channels deal with exactly this scam.

Sadly the presumed immigrant perps in these scams so rarely have their citizenship revoked and are deported as the end part of their punitive judicial sentence, signaling their adoptive country has no further use for them the day they get out of jail. And this is the judicial norm regardless of the political government of the day.

There's a good write-up on these two in the Philadelphia Inquirer telling how they are here in the USA (located near Penn State University) on work-study student visas to learn about the hospitality industry.

"According to federal prosecutors in New Jersey, the pair were members of a ring of college-age “money mules,” all recruited from the same campus in eastern India — the International Institute of Hotel Management in Kolkata — and sent to the U.S. specifically to collect the proceeds of this transnational fraud."

"At least a half-dozen others linked to the hotel management school have been arrested since January in New Jersey, Texas, and Colorado on similar charges. Each arrived in the U.S. ostensibly as part of a work-study program giving foreign students an opportunity to be interns at topflight American resorts."

https://www.inquirer.com/news/robocall-scams- ... n-20200811.html

It's a sad day when some have such opportunity to legitimately integrate this beautiful American Dream and still choose to throw it all away.. and for what? I bet their families, for generations, are beyond heartbroken.