Thirteen individuals have been charged in connection with operating scam call centers that raked in over $5 million by defrauding 400 older adults across the nation, federal prosecutors said.
The call centers based in the Dominican Republic targeted older adults in the United States, the U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Massachusetts, announced in news released on Aug. 12. Scammers obtained the money by tricking victims into believing that their grandchildren or close family members were in trouble and desperately needed money, a scheme the FBI calls a grandparent scam.
The average age of their hundreds of victims was 84, prosecutors said.
"Their goal," according to Leah B. Foley, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, "was to trick our parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends into handing over their life savings on false pretenses. And they succeeded."
Of the 13 people charged in federal court in Massachusetts, nine are in custody, according to the Department of Justice. Two of the suspected scammers are at large in the United States and two in the Dominican Republic, Christina Sterling, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said at a news conference on Aug. 12.
