Several call centers in India were raided after an investigation found that hundreds of Maryland residents were scammed out of more than $48 million.
Officials in Maryland shared the results of a “year-long, expanding investigation” that found fraudsters posing as “tech support workers” or “American law enforcement” had targeted “more than 650 victims” and taken millions from people, according to the Washington Post. The ultimate, “big goal” of the scammers is to somehow convince people that “their money wasn’t safe in the bank and that it needed to be transferred.”
As a result of the investigation, “authorities in India” conducted a raid on three call centers on December 11 and December 12, 2025.
“A staggering amount of money,” said Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent in Charge Jimmy Paul, who works as the “head of the bureau’s Baltimore field office.”
Per the outlet, “investigators this week described how the scams started at the call centers”:
Investigators this week described how the scams started at the call centers, where workers spent their days looking for American targets through email, text messages, phone calls and computer pop-up warnings.
They often played the role of a tech support worker from, say, Microsoft or Apple, persuading their marks to download software onto their computers. Or they said they were calling from the U.S. Social Security Administration to report that criminals were using the victim’s Social Security number for money laundering, drug trafficking or child pornography. “It’s always something that sound horrific,” FBI agent Jeremy Capello said.
At some point in the scam, “victims are often transferred to someone purporting to be from U.S. law enforcement agencies,” according to the outlet.
John McCarthy, who serves as “the top prosecutor in Montgomery County,” explained that people’s “antennas come down” because they believe they are “talking to a trusted person in the government.”
Breitbart News reported in 2017 on a “disturbing trend” in India of call centers trying to scam Americans, with the scammers trying to “impersonate an Internal Revenue Service employee.”
Police have also arrested multiple Indians within the United States for picking up scammed funds from Americans.
Read the full article here