Investigators said they uncovered an identity-theft ring when one of the suspects tried to spring the scam on an elderly New Yorker and wound up speaking to his daughter, a deputy police chief.

“I felt they were trying to rip someone off. Experience tells you this was not legitimate,” said Deputy Chief Joellen Kunkel, a 26-year veteran of the New York Police Department.

A grand jury in Queens has indicted 11 people on charges that they posed as federal agents to persuade hundreds of victims to turn over personal data as part of an identity-theft scheme, prosecutors said yesterday.

Four people from Queens and seven from Massachusetts were arrested and face charges including enterprise corruption, conspiracy and fraud.

Authorities said the people cold-called random phone numbers, then zeroed in if they reached someone with a foreign-sounding name, particularly immigrants of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin.

The callers claimed to be Department of Homeland Security agents doing a terrorism investigation and asked victims to contact a second group of conspirators posing as workers at a credit agency. Those scammers then had the victims turn over information including their credit card, Social Security and driver’s license numbers, as well as their birth dates. .

The ring used the information to wire money to accomplices or buy expensive items on credit. Nearly $1 million was stolen in all from people and businesses, investigators said.

Police began investigating in May after a member of the ring made a series of calls to the Kunkel family, speaking twice to a home health care aide before Chief Kunkel finally called a phone number left by one of the supposed federal agents to demand that he identify himself.