The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - A New Case: The Criminal Empire of Scam Calls

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Chameleon: Scam Likely host, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, sits down with Alex Schuman to chat about the newest season of the blockbuster Chameleon franchise. The duo dig into another scam you should be wary of - telefraud. Ordinary citizens all around the U.S. have lost their life savings to scam callers, many originating from India. These fraudsters often target especially vulnerable populations, including immigrants and the elderly. Listen as Yudhijit shares the jaw-dropping story of how a small team of investigators went on the hunt to dismantle the shadowy multinational mob behind the con in what became the biggest telefraud case in U.S. history. From Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to Smoke Screen: Puppy Kingpin and other seasons wherever you get your podcasts. Chameleon is a Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe to The Binge to get all episodes of Chameleon: Scam Likely ad-free right now. Click ‘try free’ at the top of the Chameleon: Scam Likely show page on Apple Podcasts to start your free trial or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ujijit Padacharjee is the host of Chameleon's fourth season called Scam Likely, and he's joining me today to talk fraud and about this new season. Ujijit, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, Alex. I'm a great fan of different ways. And in your first episode, you talk about having covered scams for a long time. And what is it about fraud that interests you so much? Well, I just find scams and deception inherently fascinating. And I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of listeners do, a lot of journalists do. And I guess I've thought about why I'm so fascinated by it. It's because of that thrill of discovering that things are not what they seem.

You know, I feel like as a journalist, that's my, you know, I'm always trying to dig up something that is different from what it seems on the surface. And I guess deception is kind of the purest form of that, you know, that story principle, if you can call it that. Yeah. And your season of Chameleon Scam Like Lee starts with someone who gets scammed over the phone. And we've all gotten those calls. But unlike most of us, you mentioned in the first episode that you will actually sit and talk to them or at least see what happens. Why are you willing to do that while most of us just hang out? Well, because I'm interested in scams and deception, you know, I'm always curious as to how a particular, and, you know, the number of these calls, the volume has only gone up over the years. But I recall when I first started getting

these calls, I started to notice that many of the calls, or almost all the callers making these calls sounded Indian or Pakistani, just from their accents. And that interested me even more because I grew up in India. I came to the U.S. when I was in my 20s for grad school. I was a journalist in India before I came to the U.S. So anything that's connected to India is interesting to me for a number of reasons. So in this case, I was just so curious about who these people were, how organized they were, that I wanted to find out more. And so I'd keep them on the phone for as long as possible, try and, you know, try and break through the fraudulent part of their pitch and just try and talk to them and get them to, you know, to discuss with me what got them involved in this business. But usually I didn't succeed.

Now, I don't want you to give away anything that too much of what happens in the podcast, but why is India the place where so many of these scams are coming from? That's a good question. India is, you know, home to hundreds of millions of young people, many of them educated and fluent in English, also tech savvy, and many of them looking for work because, you know, India's, even though India's gradually rising as an economic power, India's huge population still means that there's a lot of people who are poor, who are looking for work and can't find work easily. So that's one reason, you know, that India is just a fertile ground for this. And as I mentioned, a lot of these young people are conversant in English, and they have the ability to operate computers, and they're pretty savvy about websites and things like that. So you've already got a population, you know, that's almost kind of ready to be deployed in the scam industry. The other big reason is that India has a large call center

industry. You know, it started developing in the 90s, mostly call centers that offer customer service and back-end support to lots of American companies. So the infrastructure for making phone calls to Americans on a large scale already existed in India starting some 20 years ago. So somebody, I guess, you know, people started to, you know, the bad actors started to realize that they already had this infrastructure. They could employ young people who were struggling in the job market, and they could employ them to work out of call centers, making thousands of phone calls a day in order to defraud Americans. And I've had a chance to listen to some of Scam Likely, and it seems like the perpetrators

don't just target any American, but that they try to really prey on some of immigrants' greatest fears. Could you explain that a little bit? Yeah, that was definitely how the scams that we describe in the show, how they originated, they started off sometime in 2012, 2013. And early on, the scammers were targeting specifically Indian immigrants who were in the U.S. on work visas and, you know, were still sort of nervous about how long they could continue staying in the U.S., which they needed to do because of economic reasons. So, yes, in the beginning, the scammers were targeting immigrant communities with a certain type of immigration-related fraud. Ultimately, all of these scams just rely on telling, you know, false stories to try and

extort money from the victims. And those stories can differ. But early on, that story was, you know, your visa is about to run out or your immigration file has a big error in it and you're going to be deported. So you better pay up. I know that in the fourth season of Smokescreen, Puppy Kingpin, what I expected to find at the start of the investigation was so much different than what ended up being the truth. And the scam was much bigger and more complicated than I expected. Did this investigation for scam likely go where you thought it would? Yeah, it was, you know, you hear about these scams. I mean, I used to get these phone calls, like I said, and you think it's just

a bunch of people sitting at a call center making these calls and then victims here sending them money. But it's a lot more complex than that. The way that the money is ultimately brought back to the call center is quite complicated. It involves several steps and it involves real people in the United States. And so that, I guess, is one of the unique things about this podcast that we've dived into the mechanics of the scam at a level of depth that nobody else has done. And listeners will really get to understand exactly how the various elements of the scam work. The other thing that I discovered as I investigated the story was just how sophisticated the call center operations are. You know, it's not just a matter of a few schmucks sitting around and making phone calls and just, you know, grabbing whatever they can get. But there's a method to how they're preying on the vulnerabilities of elderly Americans, of, you know, single moms, of, you know, immigrant communities, you name it. I mean, they're just learning constantly through trial and error, which is kind of what you'd expect from the huge volume of calls that they're making. So really, it's a numbers game. And ultimately, this was so profitable for them because it was easy for the masterminds to employ just hundreds of people and make tens of

thousands of calls every day and keep refining their tactics and stealing millions and millions of dollars. Because those hundreds of people making those calls, like you said, a lot of them are just young people in India who want a job. Did you find that they could kind of end up being the victims as well? In some ways, of course, you know, they are victims. I mean, they're victims of their own foolishness, but also of their desperation because some of them, the ones who have gotten implicated in these scams, are going to have a tough time finding jobs in the legitimate call center industry. So they've definitely shot themselves in the foot. But no, in terms of them not knowing what they were doing, I find that hard to believe. I think many of these people employed at the call centers, you know, they might not have known exactly what they were getting into on the first day at the job,

you know, but by the end of a week, two weeks, a month, they knew exactly what they were doing because they were trained. You know, they were told, like, these are the things you're supposed to say when somebody challenges you or somebody questions you. You know, they even had people training them in accents so that they could, you know, they could sound more American. So there's definitely, you know, I feel sympathy on one level for some of these callers who were, you know, just cogs in the wheel, but it's not like they were blameless. And, you know, the ones with a conscience definitely left the industry of their own accord. And not to give away too much, but you'll hear from people like that on the show. One other question I wanted to ask you is one of the

investigators said something that I thought was really interesting, that a gun is effective for robbing a bank, but if you want to make real money, you've got to use the mind. Can you elaborate on what you think they meant there? Yeah, and I think that quote really encapsulates, you know, the idea behind these scams. You know, with violence, with a gun, with intimidation, you can probably extort people once. But if you can manipulate them, you can extort them and rob them several times. you know, sticks a gun into your back and says, hand me your money. Whereas what these scammers were doing was using a ruse to intimidate, threaten, and ultimately make so much money that it would put a street robber to shame. So I do think that the investigator, you know, who said that to us in the show,

was highlighting exactly what deception is able to achieve. That deception is a far more powerful tool than a simple weapon like a gun. And we've been talking about Scam Likely so much, I would like to let everybody listen to a clip. Here's a clip from the fourth season of Chameleon, Scam Likely. It starts with a call. You pull out your phone, look down.

The number seems sort of familiar. You press accept. The voice isn't someone you know, but they seem official. You stay on the line. You tell them, there must be a mistake. You don't owe back taxes. You aren't overdue on your loans. You already paid off that car. No, no, no.

You are just making the excuses. You can resolve this matter by paying your miscalculation amount. The caller tells you, no, there is no mistake. You gotta pay up. Like right now? Yeah, right now. Or else, there's no escape. We can find you from anywhere. You will be arrested and you will be behind the bars for five years.

You have an attorney for yourself. They will seize your bank account. And your passport will be seized. Your debit card number, your credit card number, any of your banking information. Finally, you pay. Thank you. It's over. You hang up.

And then you realize, that wasn't a collection agency. That wasn't your bank. And it certainly wasn't the IRS. It was a scam. Yudhija, if people like what they're hearing here, where can people listen? Well, folks can listen weekly wherever they get their podcasts. Or if they'd like to hear the whole season now, they can subscribe to The Binge on Apple Podcasts,

where they'll have access to all episodes ad-free. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. I've heard some of Chameleon, Scam Likely, and I can't wait to hear the rest of the season. Thank you so much, Alex, and good luck with your episodes as well.