Kirit Patel cut a deal with the FTC.
By Raif Karerat
An Indian American has been sentenced to a year in a California jail for his role in a far-reaching phony debt collection racket that saw people pose as police officers and making threatening and harassing phone calls to con millions of dollars from their victims across the United States.
After receiving a deluge of complaints, investigators with the FTC said they began tracking the calls, and following the payments, which led them right to Patel.
Kirit Patel, who headed a California company “that investigators said was the U.S. front for India-based boiler rooms,” cut a deal with the U.S. government last year in which he pleaded guilty to four counts total — counts two mail fraud and two counts wire fraud, according to ABC News.
Patel’s company was also forced to settle with the Federal Trade Commission and pay restitution to the tune of $608,500 — originally ordered to be more than $4.3 million — in order to assist victims of the scheme.
They “more or less told me that if I didn’t pay, they were going to have someone on my doorstep to arrest me,” a business owner told ABC News in 2012. “And that they were going to contact my place of business and tell them what kind of person I am.”
When ABC News tracked down Patel prior to his arrest, his attorney claimed Patel was “as snookered by the people in India as anybody,” and that his client believed he was setting up a legitimate company.