IT industry body Nasscom has expressed disappointment over Wednesday’s incident wherein 70 people were arrested near Mumbai for allegedly running three fake call centres to swindle millions of dollars from unsuspecting Americans.

“Nasscom and the BPM industry together have been proactively working with global consumer protection agencies on this issue. The industry is also investing in capacity building of law enforcement agencies in a unique public-private-partnership model executed through the Data Security Council of India,” Nasscom said in a statement.

Earlier this year, Nasscom created the Consumer Interest Protection Task Force (CIPTF) to set up an appropriate framework that would cover and transcend different departments of the government to deal with this issue. Nasscom is also working closely with organisations globally to deal with the issue.

In June, a senior Nasscom member even attended a meeting with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in Washington to discuss steps required to tackle such frauds and told BusinessLine that Nasscom would continue to work with the US government in future.

“We are working in tandem with various agencies to ensure India is positioned rightly. We’ll ensure that any unscrupulous individual or company who is indulging in such activities is taken care of,” Keshav Murugesh, Chairman, Nasscom BPM Council and Group CEO at WNS Global Services, had said.

In June, a US government official called Indian call centres as a source of various importer frauds that have targeted Americans. “Another area of international concern involves Indian call centres, which like their Jamaican counterparts, continue to be the source of various imposter frauds that have reached consumers throughout the English-speaking world,” Lois Greisman, Associate Director of the Division of Marketing Practices, in the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), said.

Increasing scams In recent years, telemarketing scam variations, including calls made with false promises of technical support, targeting unsuspecting customers have been proliferating globally. The origins and contours of such telemarketing fraud operations are global, often stretching across geographies, misusing the internet and global financial channels to access information, commit fraud, and transfer the illegitimate gains.

In Wednesday’s incident, 70 people were arrested for running three call centres where employees would make fraudulent calls to US citizens posing as agents of the US Internal Revenue Service and duping them into paying fines for tax irregularities.

According to initial investigations, the call centres employed about 630 people, mostly drug addicts, and people desperate for a job, with the employees getting ‘sales targets’ and incentives based on how much money they were able to defraud.

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