Americans lost $150M to robocall scams last year. Students from India came to Pa. and N.J. to collect, feds say – By Jeremy Roebuck (The Philadelphia Inquirer) / Aug 11 2020
Maaz Ahmed Shamsi and Zeeshan Khan appeared no different than any of the hundreds of other international students who usually arrive in Centre County, Pa., each fall on visas allowing them to study or receive on-the-job training in the United States.
They lived in a modest apartment in Boalsburg, less than 10 minutes from Pennsylvania State University’s flagship campus. They hung out in State College, mixing among the students.
But while most scrape by on financial aid, work-study jobs, and student loans, Shamsi, 23, and Khan, 22, routinely had thousands of dollars passing through their bank accounts — all now alleged to be proceeds from a global robocall scam industry that swindles more than $150 million from Americans each year.
According to federal prosecutors in New Jersey, the pair were members of a ring of college-age “money mules,” all recruited from the same campus in eastern India — the International Institute of Hotel Management in Kolkata — and sent to the U.S. specifically to collect the proceeds of this transnational fraud.
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