Aided by conspirators in India, two men in Philadelphia managed to steal millions of dollars in five months from victims by deceiving them in a phone fraud scheme to purchase MoneyPak prepaid cards of different values and hand over the codes.

Law enforcement officers from the FBI and the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) arrested the men on Tuesday for conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Phone fraud can take many forms

The duo was part of larger group of criminals, some of them located in India, that would contact the victims over the phone and resort to different threats to make them add funds to MoneyPak cards; then, the codes offering access to the money would be used to reload Green Dot Cards and purchase money orders. The orders would eventually be deposited into bank accounts.

Phone fraud is not a new criminal tactic and has been widely used in tech support scams, where the victim would generally be contacted directly by the crooks claiming to offer technical assistance in getting rid of an alleged malware infection and pushing bogus protection software for a fee.

Most of the times, these scams are operated by individuals overseas, but Malwarebytes discovered US-based tech support companies resorting to the same method, but with a different approach: the victim would call tech support after landing on a page alerting of malware trouble and providing a number for a help desk.

However, this type of deceit has many variants, in some cases the fraudsters would impersonate police or IRS officers and asking for money to solve bogus legal complications.

Bomb threats, prepaid cards, and 20 years of jailtime

In the case of the two men (Alpeshkumar Patel, 30, and Vijaykumar Patel, 39), the FBI says that they operated September 2013 through March 2014, and in one incident a bomb threat call was placed at a retail store in New Jersey.

The crook demanded a $5,000 / €3,900 payment in 10 MoneyPak cards to prevent detonation of the explosive package. The manager had already provided the code for one of the cards, when law enforcement showed up and instructed him to hang up and clear the building.

With the help of surveillance cameras, the officers identified the suspects, who bought Green Dot Cards associated with the incident and used to purchase money orders.

Investigation into the incident revealed phone numbers and IP addresses connected to about 2,500 Green Dot cards employed to transfer the money into a bank account.

The maximum penalty for the conspiracy to commit wire fraud is 20 years, and in this case, a hefty fine has to be paid.