A 34-year-old man is facing a litany of charges after being accused of defrauding at least 7,500 elderly victims out of a total of $10,000,000 in a tech support scheme, federal prosecutors in New York announced Wednesday.

Vinoth Ponmara, a citizen of India, is charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced.

The charges stem from Ponmara's alleged participation in a years-long scheme that exploited elderly victims by remotely accessing their computers and convincing victims to pay for computer support services they did not need -- and which were never provided, prosecutors said.

Ponmaran was arrested on Friday in Blaine, Washington. Attorney information was not immediately known.

According to federal prosecutors citing the indictment, from about March 2015 to December 2018 was a member of a criminal technical support fraud ring in the United States and India that specifically targeted the elderly across the U.S. and Canada, including New York.

The ring allegedly sought to trick victims into believing that their computers were infected with malware to deceive them into paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for fake repair services.

According to federal prosecutors citing the indictment, the ring worked by causing a pop-up window -- which included without authorization the corporate logo on a legitimate tech company -- to appear on their targets' computers which claimed falsely that a virus had infected the device and that they should call a particular phone number for technical support.

At times, the pop-up window threatened victims that, if they restarted or shut down their computer, it could “cause serious damage to the system,” including “complete data loss,” prosecutors said. However, no virus had infected their computers.

According to prosecutors, while the purported “virus” was a hoax, the pop-up window did cause various victims’ computers to completely “freeze,” thereby preventing the victims from accessing the data and files in their computer—which caused some victims to call the phone number listed on the pop-up window. 

Additionally the ring also targeted various victims more than once, even after they had made payments to purportedly “fix” their tech problems.

Ponmaran, according to federal prosecutors, was an India-based leader of the ring who managed a call center in that country that was used to provide the purported tech repairs in the scheme. Additionally, prosecutors allege that Ponmaran recruited co-conspirators in the U.S. to register fake corporate entities and open bank accounts used to receive the payments from victims and also directed co-conspirators to wire fraud these payments received to accounts in India.

The co-defendants, Romana Leyva and Ariful Haque, were both sentenced earlier this year following guilty pleas. Leyva was sentenced to 100 months in prison and three years of supervised release, and she was ordered to pay $4,679,586.93 and restitution of $2,707,882.91. Meanwhile, Haque was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and three years of supervised release, and he was ordered to pay forfeiture of $38,886.32 and restitution of $470,672.16.

“As alleged, the defendant was a leader of a sophisticated fraud scheme that preyed on victims, including the elderly," Williams said in a statement. "This conspiracy allegedly caused pop-up windows to appear on victims’ computers—pop-up windows which claimed, falsely, that a virus had infected the victim’s computer.  Through this and other misrepresentations, this fraud scheme deceived thousands of victims, including some of society’s most vulnerable members, into paying a total of more than $10 million.”