U.S. busts India-based tech-support scam that targeted elderly Americans

Elderly Americans were the main targets, but the machinery behind the fraud stretched across borders and through U.S. infrastructure. Federal prosecutors said Adam Young, 42, of Miami, and Harrison Gevirtz, 33, of Las Vegas, pleaded guilty in Rhode Island to helping an India-based tech-support scam ring route calls, track victims and forward numbers that kept the operation alive.

The Justice Department announced the pleas on May 20, 2026, and set sentencing for June 16, 2026. Both men pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony. Prosecutors said their business supplied telephone numbers, call routing, call tracking and call forwarding services to clients they knew were running tech-support fraud. Court documents say the conduct ran from about 2016 through 2022, and that from 2017 through April 2022 Young and Gevirtz failed to report the schemes after learning about them.

The case reaches well beyond two executives. Investigators said the probe, which began in 2020, led to convictions of five India-based telemarketing fraudsters and a former employee of the call-routing company. The Justice Department identified four of the convicted fraudsters as Sahil Narang, Chirag Sachdeva, Abrar Anjum and Manish Kumar. It also said Jagmeet Singh Virk was convicted in a separate federal case in the Northern District of California.

The fraud itself was built to exploit fear. The FBI says the scams relied on deceptive pop-up messages warning that a computer had been infected or hacked, then pushed victims to call a number and pay hundreds of dollars for fake technical support. In some cases, call-center agents remotely accessed victims’ computers and obtained personal and financial information. Officials said the India-based call centers used Young and Gevirtz’s business to route those calls and, at times, to get advice on reducing complaints and avoiding account terminations.

The scale was measured not just in convictions, but in losses. Rhode Island residents reported at least $5.7 million in losses, while authorities said tech-support scams cost Americans $2.1 billion last year. FBI elder-fraud data for 2023 showed people over 60 filed more than 18,000 tech-support-fraud complaints and lost almost $600 million, part of more than $3.4 billion in total losses reported by Americans over 60. The case suggests prosecutors are widening the net, moving after not only the people making the scam calls, but the service providers who helped them reach U.S. households at scale.