175 Months for the U.S. Organizer of an India-Based "FBI and IRS" Extortion Call Ring

What happened?

On July 8, 2015, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, part of the Department of Justice (DOJ), announced that Sahil Patel, 36, of Tatamy, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 175 months in prison, three years of supervised release and $1 million in forfeiture. He pleaded guilty in January 2015 before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who imposed the sentence.

Patel was the U.S. organizer of a fraud and extortion ring run through call centers in India.

How the scheme worked

According to the superseding indictment, court filings and statements in court, from December 2011 until his arrest on December 18, 2013:

• Call centers in India hired English-speaking employees to call people in the U.S.
• The callers worked from long lists of potential victims, which Patel and his co-conspirators called "lead sheets."
• They placed thousands of calls, impersonating officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
• They threatened victims with penalties and arrest for fictitious financial crimes.
• To mask their identities, the ring used anonymous voice-over-internet technology subscribed to under false names to make it appear connected to U.S. law enforcement.
• Payments, totaling at least $1.2 million, moved through several layers of wire transactions.

At the sentencing hearing, Judge Hellerstein said that the crime "robbed people of their identities and their money in a way that causes people to feel they have been almost destroyed."

The investigation was conducted by the FBI and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

Here's the thing ...

Look at the tools. Lead sheets and VoIP accounts opened under fake names.

That second one matters for anyone in telecom. The ring didn't need fancy hacking. It needed phone service that looked legit and couldn't be traced back. Fake subscriber names on VoIP accounts made that possible.

That's why regulators keep pushing voice providers to know their customers. If anyone can sign up under any name and look like the FBI on caller ID, scammers will.

What to do this week

• Voice providers: verify who's signing up, especially for numbers that will display government-sounding names.
• Watch for red flags like new accounts with heavy outbound traffic to U.S. consumers.
• Remind your family: the FBI and IRS don't call demanding immediate payment to avoid arrest.
• Report IRS impersonation calls to TIGTA.