Indian truck driver in US jailed for money laundering

Washington: According to the Department of Justice, an Indian truck driver in the US has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and fined $4,710 for money laundering and firearm offenses.

According to the report, Lovepreet Singh pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering in March. The court said he admitted to receiving and transmitting money obtained by his co-defendants as a result of a fraud scheme, as well as one count of unlawful possession of a firearm. Mr. Singh, who was employed as a trucker, was sentenced to 15 months in prison and was ordered to pay USD 4,710 in restitution for money laundering and firearms offenses, the Justice Department announced on Friday.

A federal indictment and court testimony alleges that beginning in 2015 and continuing through 2018, Mr. Singh and nine other defendants schemed to commit the crimes of fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and passing fictitious obligations. The Department of Justice stated in a statement that the conspirators gathered numbers and emails of computers belonging to numerous individuals throughout the country.

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Conspirators established and operated various businesses, such as World Tech Assistance and US Support Inc., in Mississippi and elsewhere in the US. They used telephone calling centers in India to place calls to the US numbers and appear to have come from US-based toll-free numbers. In the US, they called victims and informed them that malware and ransomware had infected their computers and devices and that they should contact the conspirators for assistance, federal prosecutors said.

As stated in court documents, they offered assistance to remove the software in return for a fee claiming to be ‘Apple Support’ or ‘Microsoft’ or some other legitimate and well-known technical support company. ‘Victims responded to the conspirators’ phone calls and pop-up messages to send money and payments by wire, cheque and other means. Victims also granted conspirators access to the victims’ bank accounts and to the victims’ computers, permitting the conspirators to further enrich themselves by fraudulent appropriation and taking of the money and property of the victims,’ it added.