Indian national sentenced in US for leading tech support fraud scheme

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Vinoth Ponmaran, 36, an Indian national, was sentenced to seven years in prison, for leading a tech support team that deceived more than 6,500 victims across the United States and Canada.

Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced July 31, 2024, that Ponmaran was sentenced for participating in a fraud conspiracy that exploited elderly victims by remotely accessing their computers and convincing victims to pay for computer support services that they did not need and which were never actually provided.

In total, the conspiracy generated more than $6 million in criminal proceeds. Ponmaran previously pled guilty before U.S. District Judge Vernon S. Broderick, who imposed the sentence. In addition to his prison sentence, Ponmaran, 36, was sentenced to three years of supervised release and forfeiture of $6,110,884.51.

According to the allegations contained in the Superseding Information, court filings, and statements made in court, including during Ponmaran’s plea proceeding and sentencing:

From approximately March 2015 through July 2018, Ponmaran was a member of a criminal fraud ring based in the U.S. and India that committed the technical support fraud scheme targeting elderly victims. The Fraud Ring’s primary objective was to trick victims into believing that their computers were infected with malware in order to deceive them into paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for phony computer repair services.

The scheme generally worked as follows.  First, the fraud ring caused pop-up windows to appear on victims’ computers.  The pop-up windows claimed, falsely, that a virus had infected the victims’ computers.  The pop-up windows directed the victims to call a particular telephone number to obtain technical support.  In at least some instances, the pop-up windows threatened victims that, if they restarted or shut down their computer, it could “cause serious damage to the system,” including “complete data loss.”  In an attempt to give the false appearance of legitimacy, in some instances the pop-up windows included, without authorization, the corporate logo of a well-known, legitimate technology company.

In fact, no virus had infected victims’ computers, and the technical support phone numbers in the pop-up windows were not associated with the legitimate technology company.  Rather, these representations were false and were designed to trick victims into paying the Fraud Ring to “fix” a problem that did not exist.  And while the purported “virus” was a hoax, the pop-up windows themselves did cause various victims’ computers to completely “freeze,” thereby preventing these victims from accessing the data and files in their computer—which caused some victims to call the phone number listed in the pop-up windows.  In exchange for victims’ payment of several hundred or thousand dollars (depending on the precise “service” victims purchased), the purported technicians remotely accessed the victim’s computers and ran an anti-virus tool, which is free and available on the Internet.

Ponmaran was an India-based leader of the Fraud Ring.  Among other things, Ponmaran managed a call center in India that was used to provide purported computer repair services to victims of the scheme.  He also recruited co-conspirators in the U.S. to register fraudulent corporate entities and open bank accounts that were used to receive fraud proceeds from victims of the scheme.  Ponmaran also laundered fraud proceeds in multiple ways, including by directing co-conspirators to wire fraud proceeds to accounts in India and the U.S.

Ponmaran’s co-defendants, Romana Leyva and Ariful Haque, were both sentenced by Judge Paul A. Crotty in 2022, following their respective guilty pleas.  Leyva was sentenced to 100 months in prison and three years of supervised release, and she was ordered to forfeit $4,679,586.93 and to pay restitution of $2,707,882.91.  Haque was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and three years of supervised release, and he was ordered to forfeit $38,886.32 and to pay restitution of $470,672.16.