They bought Internet phone devices in bulk, used thousands of prepaid debit cards to launder money from North America to India and left behind elderly victims who were bullied into forking over thousands of dollars.
U.S. authorities announced on Thursday that they had charged 56 people and five companies operating call centres in India in a case that offers a peek into a widespread telephone scam that has swindled millions of dollars from people in Canada and the United States.
While the allegations unveiled on Thursday do not mention Canada, the indictment says the victims were “in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
An RCMP spokeswoman said the force believes there might be a Canadian connection.
“Victims have reported that at times a caller would identify themselves as [an Internal Revenue Service] agent to the victim, and then change tactics when he/she realized that in Canada there is no IRS,” Sergeant Penny Hermann told The Globe and Mail on Thursday in response to a question.