Aided by conspirators in India, two men in Philadelphia managed to steal millions of dollars in five months from victims by deceiving them in a phone fraud scheme to purchase MoneyPak prepaid cards of different values and hand over the codes.
Law enforcement officers from the FBI and the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) arrested the men on Tuesday for conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Phone fraud can take many forms
The duo was part of larger group of criminals, some of them located in India, that would contact the victims over the phone and resort to different threats to make them add funds to MoneyPak cards; then, the codes offering access to the money would be used to reload Green Dot Cards and purchase money orders. The orders would eventually be deposited into bank accounts.
Phone fraud is not a new criminal tactic and has been widely used in
tech support scams, where the victim would generally be contacted directly by the crooks claiming to offer technical assistance in getting rid of an alleged malware infection and pushing bogus protection software for a fee.
