Three people accused of committing fraudby posing as technical support have been arrested by authorities. Their victims were mainly elderly people, whom they tricked into extorting money from them for fake repairs to their devices.
The three defendants, Gunjit Malhotra, Gurjet Singh and Jas Pal, claimed they worked in technical support for large technology companies, gained access to the victims' computers and caused malfunctions to convince them that they needed repairs.
The fraud had been occurring for seven years since 2013 and was charging its services to many different companies, with its profits amounting to 1.3 million dollars.
According to an FBI agent, the three scammers were using a typical method used for tech support scams, calling victims claiming to be from world-renowned IT companies and warning them that their computer was infected with a virus.
Also, they waited for the victims to call them, probably because they had received fake messages that falsely notified them that their computer systems had been infected. This is a common tactic that relies on users clicking the wrong link and being taken to dangerous websites.
After contacting them, the scammers deceived their victims to give them permission for remote access to their computer.
The victims paid thousands of dollars
Most of the victims paid amounts between $225 and $799 for fake multi-year service provision programs.
One of their victims even reported that she paid over $136,600 for technical support services, after the scammers claimed that her computers had network security and hardware problems.
Impersonating support technicians, the scammers remotely accessed the victim's computer and did their job
Seeing that they could make money from the victim, the scammers called every few weeks and demanded to be paid over roughly a year, from April 2018 to February 2019.
The investigation found that the alleged technical support from Malhotra, Singh, and Pal received at least $1.3 million, which was transferred to accounts opened abroad.
The researchers located about $555,000 in accounts in India. The complaint does not make clear to whom or for what the money was intended, but of the three individuals involved in the fraud only Malhotra lived mainly in India and visited the US occasionally.
The charges for the three perpetrators are email fraud, with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, and conspiracy to access a computer for malicious purposes, with a minimum prison sentence of two years. Singh is also charged with identity theft with a minimum prison sentence of two years.
