JAIPUR: Thirty four people, including two girls, were arrested by Jaipur police for running fake call centres and duping foreigners on the pretext of saving tax dues and increasing their credit limits.These conmen impersonated as sleuths of US Internal Revenue Service and agents of a leading investment agency.As per officials, the accused had been running the racket from four separate locations in the city. As per estimates, they must have made about Rs 2.5 crore from the illegal operations.Intelligence unit of Rajasthan police had tipped off city cops about the illegal activities a month ago which led to the arrests on Thursday.According to DCP (south) Yogesh Dadhich, the gang’s leader Hardik Patel (31), a Gujarat-based software engineer, hired people on a monthly salary of Rs 15,000 who could fake US accent.‘Patel had prepared a script for employees’“They bought phone numbers, address and bank data of several US citizens from another gang operating in the US. For each individual’s data, Patel paid about one cent of a dollar. The data was distributed among the employees to ring up US citizens,” Dadhich said.The call centre employees would target US citizens, mostly those living on the margins of the society, by telling them that their credit score was poor because of which they would not be able to avail the company’s lucrative easy loan schemes.“They offered to increase the credit limit by depositing a forged cheque of up to $300 into the victim’s bank accounts. The victim would get an instant message about money credit limit being increased. Then scammers would tell their preys to return the money in form of I-tune gift cards, bitcoins or Walmart cards,” Dadhich said.The police said by the time the US banks could verify the bank cheque, the account holders had already been duped.“These cheques were fraudulent, therefore, the victims later found out that they had actually paid from their own pocket,” said additional DCP (South) Avnish Sharma , adding that once the victims had paid money to the scammers, the latter would transfer it into some offshore accounts in China and Hong Kong to launder it.Another most frequently used trick by the accused was impersonating as US tax officials and intimidating victims across the US that authorities have detected tax anomalies or irregularities.“They influenced their victims by saying that they needed to pay specific amount as a tax return to avoid IRS (Internal Revenue Service) action,” Sharma said.The initial investigations revealed that Patel had prepared a two-paragraph script for his employees. “The employees were asked to learn the script and recite it in perfect English while conversing with their targets,” the official said.

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