A 43 year old former call center boss from Lima, Peru, was extradited to the USA last week so she can be tried on fraud and extortion charges. The call centers managed by Carla Magaly Alcedo Mendoza (pictured) falsely claimed to be acting on behalf of universities, government agencies and aid centers wanting to help the Hispanic community in the USA. Calls in Spanish promised financial aid for English language tuition. Recipients who expressed an interest would later receive follow-up calls that demanded payment of bogus fees. Victims were pressured to pay and threatened with lawsuits and arrest if they refused. If found guilty, Alcedo could potentially be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
Alcedo’s criminal enterprise is said to have generated USD15mn in revenue from its victims over a five-year period. Alleged associates of Alcedo have previously been arrested, extradited and imprisoned. One of those associates is Jose Alejandro Zuñiga Cano, who received a 98-month prison sentence in the USA last year after pleading guilty to defrauding 30,000 Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the USA. Zuñiga was also ordered to pay USD700,000 in restitution to more than 1,100 victims of his crimes.
Some victims of Zuñiga that were tricked into making payments would later receive additional calls that claimed to be from lawyers working to obtain refunds. They were told the bogus refunds could only be claimed if the victim made yet another payment to release them.
Whilst it is good that the wheels of justice have turned in this case, it is also clear that those wheels turn too slowly. Alcedo’s call center operated between 2013 and 2018. She was arrested by the Peruvian police at the request of the American authorities in 2023. Extradition inevitably introduces delays, but trying to shorten the extradition process makes little difference if fraudsters can make illegal calls for five years without being detected. Nor should it take another five years just to identify and arrest the individuals responsible for running call centers that commit crime. Different criminals might have disappeared during that time.
There is a side to the international telecoms sector that generates its profit by facilitating telemarketing traffic from offshored call centers. There is also a side to the international telecoms sector that would no longer be profitable if all criminal traffic was stopped. Some of the people who claim to represent the interests of the communications sector do not really represent the interests of all of the communications sector, because it is not in the interests of most telcos to have customers who are scared to answer calls because of endless stories about belligerent spammers and scammers.
For some telcos to have a healthy future it will be necessary to ruthlessly weed out the businesses that depend on the international traffic generated by crooked call centers. That will only happen if robust know-your-customer (KYC) checks become mandatory. The lack of KYC controls is the root explanation for why there are so many scams of this type, why so few result in punishment for the criminals who run them, and why it takes so long to bring them to justice.
The US Department of Justice press release for Alcedo’s extradition can be seen here.
