It comes as two U.S. business executives pleaded guilty to federal charges this week.
The FBI on Wednesday said it shut down an India-based call center accused of defrauding elderly Americans of millions of dollars, also confirming that two senior executives of the call center “just admitted” to charges that they allowed the fraud to occur.
In a post on X, the FBI’s Boston office said that “hundreds of elderly victims here in the U.S. [and] abroad” were defrauded “out of millions of dollars through tech support scams.”
“Our senior citizens deserve honor, respect, and protection, and if you target them, we will do everything we can to bring you to justice,” the office said in the social media post.
The announcement came as the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a news release on Wednesday saying two business executives, Adam Young of Florida and Harrison Gervitz of Nevada, “admitted to operating a business that provided telecommunications-related services, including telephone numbers, call routing services, call tracking, and call forwarding services, to customers they knew were engaged in tech-support fraud schemes.”
Young and Gevirtz entered the guilty pleas after an investigation that started roughly six years ago led to the conviction of five India-based individuals on fraud charges. Indian citizens Sahil Narang, Chirag Sachdeva, Abrar Anjum, and Manish Kumar were convicted of fraud charges that defrauded millions of dollars from American citizens.
“The investigation further revealed that call centers based in India utilized Young and Gervitz’s business to route their ’tech fraud’ scheme calls and, in some instances, advised those fraudsters on methods intended to reduce complaints and prevent account terminations,” the DOJ said, according to the press release, which was linked by the FBI in its announcement on X.
It said that Young and Gervitz had failed to report fraud schemes to law enforcement officials after they had received a number of complaints from telephone companies and law enforcement officials, relating to concerns about tech-support fraud.
“Despite that knowledge, they advised some of their customers about techniques the customers could use to avoid complaints by fraud victims and prevent account termination,” the DOH said, adding that they even “assisted some of those customers to buy and sell fraud calls amongst themselves.”
