Indian Call Centers posing as the IRS are blasting phone calls to consumers in US & Canada

Betsy Broder, counsel for international consumer protection at FTC says business process outsourcing fraud is an increasing concern for American agencies, both in civil and criminal cases, and it hopes Indian businesses will be open to using existing legislation to help expedite the process.

“We certainly are aware that these operations are all over, but we at FTC have a consumer complaint database, and in the past year, we've received 400,000 complaints about what we call imposter scams ... (where the caller) claims to be from a well-known technology company or a law enforcement authority and threatens that either the computer is going to seize up or one owes money to taxes.Many of these are traced back to India,“

She added in the past yearand-a-half, over 40,000 complaints were received where the consumers identified the callers as having an Indian accent.

A direct impact of such fraudulent operations is on the Indian BPO sector, whose image is being tarnished by those who are “blasting phone calls to consumers in US, Canada Australia the UK, (and) even nonEnglish speaking countries“.

“All they know is they get a call that appears to be from a business from India, and they were defrauded of money. And that makes them distrust the next time they call for customer support and they hear an Indian accent,“ she added.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) of India is said to be working on solving some of these issues through its Consumer Interest Protection Task Force that is looking at ways to deter fly-bynight operators that indulge in unscrupulous activities and could lead to reputational loss for the Indian industry.