Maharashra IRS scam: Fake call centres raked in Rs 1.5 crore a month, say cops
The police said some of the accounts they raided had seen transactions worth Rs 18 crore. But the transactions were of 2012, when the call centres on Mira Road were not operational. (Express file photo) The police said some of the accounts they raided had seen transactions worth Rs 18 crore. But the transactions were of 2012, when the call centres on Mira Road were not operational. (Express file photo)
THE fake call centres operating out of the Mira Road-Bhayander stretch made Rs 1.5 crore per month in the nearly nine months that they were operational, the Thane police have said.
According to figures quoted in the remand report that the Thane police submitted to seek further custody of Sagar Thakkar, the alleged mastermind of the scam, the call centres over nine months made around Rs 14 crore in iTunes cards, through which payments were made by the victims, all US citizens. The court extended Thakkar’s remand by three days.
An officer linked to the probe said that the calculations they had done over the past few weeks threw up the figure of Rs 14 crore, which the call centres had looted from the US citizens by claiming to be calling from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). “We made these calculations based on the 16-digit iTunes card numbers that we found with the accused. They would maintain a record of the daily payments they collected from US citizens, based on which we made the calculations,” the officer said. This amount is only from the call centres operating from the Mira Road-Bhayander stretch, and does not include what the fake call centres in Ahmedabad made.
The officer added, “They were functioning in the Mira Bhayandar stretch for a period of eight months, from around February 2016 till October 2016, when the raids were conducted.The Rs 1.5 crore that was collected did not go entirely to Thakkar, but would be divided among those at the top. The largest share came to Thakkar.”
The police so far suspect Thakkar used the fraudulently earned money to purchase a bungalow in Ahmedabad and two high-end vehicles, among others.
Apart from this, the police have found that Thakkar used 12 firms based in Gujarat to route the money that he had earned from the call centres. While seeking his custody, the police told Judicial Magistrate First Class A B Katte that a team was already in Gujarat to get details on these 12 firms. The officer told the court that they would need Thakkar’s custody to cross-verify the information the team would get about these firms.
While during the earlier remand, Thakkar’s lawyers had not opposed police custody, on Monday, lawyers Rahul Patil and Nafees Momin, representing Thakkar, argued against the custody. They told the court that the police had already had had his custody for 10 days and there was no need for further custodial interrogation.
In the IRS scam, people employed with fake call centres would call up US citizens, claim to be from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and threaten them to make payments. The Thane police conducted raids at nine call centres operating from the Mira-Bhayander stretch on October 6 last year.
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