New Delhi: A 25-year old youth from Gujarat was arrested in the United States for duping an elderly couple from Michigan. He has been accused of allegedly stealing $50,000 and routing the amount to India through forex companies in Ahmedabad, according to a report by The Times of India.
It has opened a can of worms with investigators believing the money trail to be multi-layered. According to reports, the trail goes much deeper with many international students on Indian visas have been allegedly misled and used to carry out fraud operations on a global scale. These fraud agencies often lure students by providing them with lucrative incentives or threaten them to join their schemes.
How he was tracked down
The agencies have also been running many illegal call centers in Gujarat to defraud US citizens and are using these students as entities through whom the operations are being carried out.
The 25- year old suspect, according to the police of Shelby Township in Michigan, contacted the elderly couple through email on April 5 this year. He was tracked by the authorities, using the surveillance data.
He was enrolled in a top university based in Gandhinagar and was arrested from north Gujarat in April. He is undergoing federal investigation for various frauds conducted previously that attempted to target senior citizens.
Entered US illegally
According to reports, he had travelled to Ontario in 2023 on a student exchange program. He later illegally entered the US.
The accused informed the elderly couple that they had pending fraudulent charges for child pornography on their credit card. He was posing as an agent of the US Treasury and convinced the couple to withdraw $50,000 in cash and place it in a box so that he could collect it by himself. Two days post this incident, he rented a car and drove it to their place to collect the cash. He further threatened the couple to not let anyone know about the transaction.
However, even after tracking him down, the police was not successful in recovering the amount since he had already transferred the money to India.
He was taken into custody on April 30 and charges were pressed against him.
