Indian Student Sentenced To 60 Months In Prison For Telemarketing Scam

An Indian college intern gets 60 months in jail for providing a telemarketing scam with tech support. The fraudsters behind the scam got away with nearly a million dollars from two dozen people.

21-year-old Bishwajeet Kumar Jha and some other interns who were studying at the same college back in India came to the US for internships in the hospitality industry. The US Justice Department reported that the group scammed different people of their retirement savings.

Once Jha completed his imprisonment in the US, he will have to face the deportation process.

The victims of the scam are people whose ages are from 58 to 93 years old. The money that they were scammed ranged from $1,180 to $174,300. Over the course of three months, the group defrauded an amount of money worth $937,280, as reported by officials from the Justice Department.

According to federal prosecutors, the victims initially thought that they had spent money on technology support and the tech support company had transferred back to their bank accounts.

One fraudster would call a client to tell them that they had received funds in their account. The person was then guided to return the funds. In some cases, the victims were asked to transfer the money overseas.

On November last year, the Newport police broke up the telemarking scam. As part of the investigation, a residence search was authorized.

During the search, the police found many items that were used by the fraudsters.

Another investigation revealed that the co-conspirators which operated in Newport then transferred large sums of money to a bank account in California. The majority of funds were then transferred to India, Singapore, and China.

US Attorney Aaron L Weisman said about the case: