I work in the retail financial institution world. It is truly mind boggling, sad and infuriating how many senior citizens are losing their life savings to these criminals.
Like all other aspects of our country, these people have been abandoned by the their elected representatives.
$10 billion dollars is sucked out of our senior citizen’s bank accounts and into these Indian scammers pockets each year.
Our government wont do anything about it despite the fact, as these videos prove, it is extremely easy to find the people responsible for the fraud.
These scammers are sadly very good at social engineering and intimidation.
One of the common refund scams involves convincing the victim they’ve been charged for a subscription or purchase, say for $420.00 and tells them they will process a refund. They get the victim to download a program such as Any Desk which gives the scammer access to their computer and then asks them to log into their bank account.
Once logged in, the scammer creates a diversion and blocks their screen and their mouse and keyboard, sometimes under the guise of running a security scan to look for malicious viruses, and using HTML editing, makes it look like they were actually charged for the $420.00.
They then send them a bogus refund form and ask the victim to type in the refund amount. But instead of $420.00 it automatically adds to more zeros for a refund amount of $4,200.00. The scammer again using HTML editing, makes it look like the victim actually received $4,200.00 in their bank account.
Then the scammer will blame the victim for typing in the wrong amount, telling the victim that this mistake will cost them their job, sometime resorting to tears…
They then tell the victim they need to send back the excess $ often via purchasing gift cards or going to their bank to do a wire transfer and telling the victim not to disclose the reason for the withdrawal, telling them they need to tell the bank it is for a wedding present or for a home improvement or that the reason for the large number and amount of gift cards is for anything but for a refund.
They sometimes also threaten the victim with an arrest if they do not immediately send back the money.
Some retailers like Target and others will flag large purchases of multiple gift cards in large amounts and try to tell the victim they are possibly being scammed.
“Our government wont do anything about it despite the fact, as these videos prove, it is extremely easy to find the people responsible for the fraud.”
The problem lies mostly with the local Indian government, especially in West Bengali, Kolkata, who are corrupt and often in bed with the scammers.
To their credit Scammer Payback and Trilogy Media have been successful in getting some scammer call centers shut down and with arrests. But as soon as one is shut down, another pops up.