[HN Gopher] Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian c...
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Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in
2022: report
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 478 points
Date : 2022-12-27 15:37 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
| linhns wrote:
| [flagged]
| paulproteus wrote:
| This is a good joke because numbers came from India:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_s...
| woodruffw wrote:
| My understanding is that most of these scams use spoofed
| numbers (or legitimate forwarding numbers), so there's no "just
| ignore it" remediation. SHAKEN/STIR[1] is meant to address this
| kind of spoofing, but it's not a stretch to imagine that these
| kinds of scams mostly target older people who are less likely
| to have (or understand) Caller ID anyways.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
| bilalnpe wrote:
| Yeah, they spoof local numbers. I haven't lived in the city
| my area code is from in a long time. Occasionally I'll answer
| calls from there when I'm bored and it's always a scammer.
|
| What's even more disturbing is that I'm now getting calls
| from people talking in Hindi. I answer in English but they
| ask me to switch to Hindi. (I'm from Pakistan and speak Urdu
| which is mutually intelligible with Hindi). I'm guessing it's
| to build familiarity/trust.
|
| They want to pay off my phone, electric and other bills and
| in return I pay them 50% of the amount. I give them fake info
| and try to keep them on as long as possible... asking them to
| repeat multiple times. Sometimes I'll tell how thankful I am
| that they came to me with this 50% off offer because I'm
| facing financial troubles. Not once did any of them fell bad
| about trying to scam a poor person. Their response is usually
| something like "This is exactly why we are offering this
| service, to help people like you".
|
| Eventually they get frustrated and hangup. This way I can
| hurt their ROI just a bit.
| jmspring wrote:
| Due to that whole lack of authentication I. The phone system,
| we get lots of spoofed numbers here in the US. I ignore most
| unknown calls but manage to answer maybe one a month that is an
| obvious foreign (usually Indian sounding) call center.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| USA carriers should probably just block them like they do
| almost every Chinese phone number.
| woodruffw wrote:
| There's no meaningful blocking here: the victimizing party is
| spoofing, or using a "legitimate" forwarding service.
| Carriers could just cut India off entirely, but (1) money
| finds a way, and (2) we're going to cut off service for a
| democratic country of over a billion people because of a few
| scammers?
|
| The remediation here needs to be statutory: (1) anti-spoofing
| needs to happen at the carrier level and not just the
| terminating connection, and (2) forwarding services need to
| be subjected to additional oversight and transparency
| requirements.
| jjeaff wrote:
| $10 Billion is not just a few scammers. That is an
| unfathomably huge industry.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I can certainly fathom $10 billion. But I take your
| point; my point was that, even if there are a million
| criminals involved in telephone fraud in India, it's a
| _tiny_ fraction of overall (and primarily legitimate!)
| telephone traffic. Interfering with over a billion
| peoples ' ability to talk with their loved ones requires
| _existential_ damage to our country, not frustrating
| crime that 's best resolved with international
| cooperation.
|
| Edit: I think a generally useful framing for these kinds
| of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft:
| nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each
| year in _just_ the top 10 states[1]. This doesn 't
| somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don't see the same
| kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the
| Internet.
|
| [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-
| billions-fro...
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I think Americans feel differently about a domestic issue
| of Americans stealing from Americans than they do about a
| developing country scamming elderly Americans out of
| their social security income.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of
| criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft:
| nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each
| year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn't somehow
| excuse phone fraud, but you don't see the same kind of
| grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet.
|
| Cutting F500s off the internet would do nothing about
| wage theft. There is considerable advocacy for strong
| action to bring wage theft under control, too. So, I'd
| say this analogy fails its purpose on multiple levels.
| [deleted]
| autotune wrote:
| It's never an "Indian number," it always appears to originate
| locally or in the US. Either way, I just use good hygiene and
| ignore all outside calls unless on contact list. The only
| people who ever need to call me are family and PagerDuty.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The trick is to get a random number from a place in the US that
| you don't know anyone and then ignore numbers that are too
| similar.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Absolute ignorance followed by absolute arrogance. Classic!
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think most people are downvoting you because this advice is
| useless, given that those calls never come from Indian phone
| numbers. I'd like to note that I'm downvoting you because
| that's not what a tautology is.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| _"It may not be a national security concern yet, but the
| reputation (of a country) is involved, and we don't want India to
| suffer on that count," Daud told the publication._
|
| What about the victims?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > It may not be a national security concern yet
|
| This translate to "we even conceive going into war because of
| this".
|
| > but the reputation (of a country) is involved
|
| And this translated to "and economic sanctions are very
| likely".
|
| So, don't think this is a bland statement.
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's an Indian news site. The framing makes sense for a
| domestic (and expat) audience.
| prottog wrote:
| To be fair, the person who made that statement is the FBI's
| legal attache in New Delhi. One would expect a person in such a
| position to say something like that, to smooth relations with
| the host country.
|
| But yes, I hope the perpetrators are brought to justice and the
| victims receive some kind of recompense.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > To be fair, the person who made that statement is the FBI's
| legal attache in New Delhi. One would expect a person in such
| a position to say something like that, to smooth relations
| with the host country.
|
| "It _may_ not be a national security concern _yet_ ," is
| actually a fairly ominous statement from an FBI official of
| any kind.
| allisdust wrote:
| Problem is the ring leaders of the scam call centres that
| actually finance the operations and move the stolen funds are
| usually not Indian residents. Once one call center is busted,
| they move to recruit another. The employees themselves aren't
| blameless either and need to be caught but the problem will
| simply rotate between countries if the brains are not caught. The
| reason there are so many scam call centres are there in India is
| the same reason there are so many customer support call centres:
| cheap English speaking labour.
| [deleted]
| PaybackTony wrote:
| I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The
| unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely
| already have everything they need to largely put a stop to it but
| they knowingly ignore it. It's the biggest problem in the US
| because because of pricing. It's expensive to run outbound
| campaigns in almost any other country, and very cheap in the US
| (fractions of a penny per minute compared to 5-10c per minute in
| some EU locations). Scammers need volume to make money.
|
| The reason carriers -- from the local exchange carriers and up --
| ignore it is because just a single scam operation can mean 10s of
| thousands of dollars in volume a month, and sometimes more. Since
| they have to self-report for the most part they're not very
| incentivized to stop it. There are a few easy to implement
| regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of
| it, but carriers push back hard on those regulations and they
| never stick.
|
| I know from experience dealing with this that it's absolutely not
| ignorance that's at play on the regulatory and commercial side.
| It's disgusting, and as fueled with greed and red tape as you'd
| fear.
| jesuscript wrote:
| That's kind of sad that they won't just fix it if they can. I
| over hear my elderly parents give each other tips like "don't
| open that email, it's fake" and things like that.
| jyu wrote:
| How many broken systems are the result of perverse incentives?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Absolutely everything: car dependency, affordable housing and
| healthcare, hard drugs, the environment, corporate tax
| evasion, energy, money laundering, immigration, good pay for
| nursing and teaching staff, etc.
|
| _" We can't fix X because then sector Y would suffer
| trillions in losses and jobs so it's best to keep the status
| quo and kick the can down the road."_
| nojs wrote:
| It may also be that they see this as a slippery slope of being
| responsible for moderating the content of phone calls, which is
| not a road I imagine carriers want to go down.
| baron816 wrote:
| Can you please tell this to congress?
| supertrope wrote:
| Congress already passed the TRACED Act. The FCC is moving
| relatively quickly in issuing government orders (as fast as a
| federal agency can move). It will take years for phone
| companies to upgrade to signing calls with level A
| attestation. Right now 20% of calls are signed and that
| includes level B attestation (we know the number is not
| spoofed but not who is using it) and level C (we only know
| the upstream phone company). If signing is implemented it
| will take more time to finally cut off non-signed calls.
| Tracing abuse takes time. Then robocallers can not pay fines
| and open another LLC. Hopefully this will reach an
| equilibrium like email where 99% of raw email traffic is spam
| but spam filters make it reasonable for individuals.
| smachiz wrote:
| Are you referring to STIR/SHAKEN that is a requirement and has
| been/is being rolled out?
|
| I'm not sure how much was commercial benefit vs lazyness/no
| incentive to solve the issue directly - the telcos aren't
| making a lot of money on inbound calling. It's just a problem
| that didn't impact them directly - only their customers.
| pards wrote:
| The telco's complacency have trained their customers to not
| answer the phone thereby destroying one of their primary
| businesses. Gen Z and Y consider it rude to call people.
| PaybackTony wrote:
| Have to touch on this as it's a common theme to my response.
| There absolutely are regulations. However, regulations being
| in place, and the enforcement of these regulations are
| different. STIR/SHAKEN is a requirement, however it's an easy
| requirement for scammers to meet. (Numbers are super cheap to
| buy in bulk, pennies per month typically). Sooner or later
| they'll run out.
|
| The second side of the regulation miss is that carriers have
| to self-report much of the time. These centers pay into the 6
| figures monthly to their carriers. The carriers know exactly
| what kind of traffic is being sent through and many times
| aide these scammers in shaping the traffic to look more
| legit. Auto-warranty scams in the past? Huge amounts of that
| traffic were routed through the likes of Y-Tel and a couple
| others. Regulators knew this but enforcement took years to
| happen. It's the same right now.
|
| Lastly is the issue of what happens once enforcement occurs?
| The answer is not great: The scammers change numbers and keep
| going. They aren't local and it's not cut and dry when it
| comes to continuous enforcement against foreign entities.
| Their carriers still support them and the fines are typically
| less than a month's revenue from the larger outfits (think
| Uber).
|
| Better meta-data helps aide robo / scam / spam blockers. IMO,
| we should just shut down these carriers who knowingly aide
| these scammers. We know who they are, they aren't hard to
| find.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| >It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing.
| It's expensive to run outbound campaigns in almost any other
| country, and very cheap in the US (fractions of a penny per
| minute compared to 5-10c per minute in some EU locations).
| Scammers need volume to make money.
|
| You've completely missed the mark here. You might have telco
| experience, but you have no clue whatsoever about the economics
| of these scams.
|
| These scams are so profitable it makes no difference to the
| scammers if they're paying 10c per minute or calling for free.
|
| It's the biggest problem in the US because people speak
| English. Europeans do not speak English, to scam Germans you
| have to recruit German, Austrian or Swiss people. You can hire
| literally anyone to scam Americans.
| PaybackTony wrote:
| At one point I worked on the very systems they used (dialers,
| PBX, internal CRMs), with the carriers that enabled it. This
| wasn't an opinion of mine, I was merely passing along real-
| world information from someone who worked in the industry
| (me). Many in this thread completely underestimate the volume
| these centers call at. We aren't talking hundreds of
| thousands of minutes per month per center. We're talking
| millions of minutes. Cost per minute is a massive cost even
| at 1/6 increments. The call center we ran, that was direct
| marketing / support typically had telecom bills well into the
| 6 figures every month at the height.
|
| Their scams are purposefully asinine. It's not profitable to
| spend time and effort into tricking the wise into an unwise
| act. It's far more profitable searching for the unwise to act
| in kind. So when you throw your hands up asking "Who would
| fall for that!?" The answer is typically: Someone who'd be
| willing to buy a gift card or share bank account info. This
| contradicts your last point that a given locale is more or
| less likely to be scammed given the native language.
|
| Language barriers are a part of the issue, yes, but these
| centers are capable of calling and speaking a number of
| languages. Cost and regulation are the big factors here. Just
| like any other business model. I got out of the business
| (telecom / direct marketing saas) right when EU started
| raising fees and coming down on some of the bad actors.
| Unfortunately for the US, that meant those bad actors focused
| even more in the US.
|
| Also, the scams really aren't as profitable as you'd think
| most of the time. They generally can't afford more than a $50
| CPA at best. Again, they have to turn heavy volume to get to
| their target market. They also rotate "offers". You hear
| about the big "wins" a lot (Grandma scammed for 50k+) but
| those are outliers. Typically it's $20 here, $100 there.
| Again, volume.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I think you missed the point the previous poster was making:
| These non-US-based scams generate a ton of revenue for
| telcos, which is why they are not incented to stop them.
|
| I don't know anything about it, just trying to clarify what
| (I think) previous poster meant.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| PaybackTony literally said "It's the biggest problem in the
| US because because of pricing." and went on to explain how
| calling in EU is much more expensive. I think it's safe to
| assume that he just didn't think this through.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| By absolute numbers, I do believe OP is correct. In
| Germany, we do have a problem with phone based scams as
| well, but since we have modern ways of transferring money
| (SEPA wire transfers / direct debit) and actually useful
| identity cards that make opening fake bank accounts for
| mules very difficult, almost all scams rely on personal
| contact instead - the most common scheme is fake
| policemen, where the callcenter will call elderly people
| and pressure them to go to their bank to draw cash, then
| a "policeman" shows up at the door and takes the cash.
| psnehanshu wrote:
| Maybe Americans should abandon English.
| dylan604 wrote:
| wasn't there a language created/designed specifically to be
| an international replacement, but was universally laughed
| at as a response?
| shockeychap wrote:
| > You might have telco experience, but you have no clue
| whatsoever about the economics of these scams.
|
| Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is
| more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of
| what they said.
|
| Furthermore, saying "it makes no difference to the scammers
| if they're paying 10c per minute or calling for free" shows
| an equally clear failure to understand the economics of these
| scams. The vast majority of calls made by a scammer will
| yield nothing. They have to make numerous calls to find the
| one sucker who can be convinced to turn over their financial
| information or mail cash or do whatever needs to be done. I
| don't know the exact per-minute cost at which most scams
| become cost prohibitive, but I'm pretty sure you'd be shocked
| at how little it is. If it takes 2,000 calls to find one
| victim, and you're paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend
| $200 per victim. Will you make that much back, and will it be
| enough to offset all of the other costs involved in trolling?
| It depends. But it definitely makes it less appetizing than
| when the calls are free.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| >Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence
| is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the
| merit of what they said.
|
| It's not defaming the OP. I did address the merit of what
| they said.
|
| > If it takes 2,000 calls to find one victim, and you're
| paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend $200 per victim.
|
| Yes, but in reality it takes less than 10 calls to find one
| victim.
|
| > Will you make that much back, and will it be enough to
| offset all of the other costs involved in trolling?
|
| These scammers are pulling hundreds of thousands from
| individual victims. Even at the low end they're earning
| thousands.
|
| These scams are so profitable that you can't increase costs
| of calling enough to stop them while also keeping phone
| calls accessible to normal people.
| shockeychap wrote:
| You're correct that _some_ of the scams yield hundreds of
| thousands of dollars. Like I said, I knew someone to whom
| that happened. However, _most_ scammers look for smaller
| payouts in quantity. Think of ransomware that make it
| look like your computer is full of viruses just so they
| can "sell" the uninstaller for a few hundred bucks.
| There are hundreds (if not thousands) of these incidents
| for every one incident involving a large $100K+ payout.
|
| It makes sense, given that people are willing to act a
| lot more independently (without consulting others) when
| only a small amount is on the line, they often won't
| admit to these missteps out of embarrassment, AND,
| perhaps most importantly, it won't raise the ire of
| federal law enforcement enough to be concerned about
| things like extradition and prosecution.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| > You're correct that some of the scams yield hundreds of
| thousands of dollars. Like I said, I knew someone to whom
| that happened. However, most scammers look for smaller
| payouts in quantity. Think of ransomware that make it
| look like your computer is full of viruses just so they
| can "sell" the uninstaller for a few hundred bucks.
|
| Those are the exact scammers who will get you to install
| teamviewer/anydesk and use it to empty your bank account,
| with the $100 charge just working as a distraction. You
| can find videos showing how these scams work on youtube.
|
| Of course lots of people won't have $100k or even $10k in
| their bank account, the scammers will just send those
| people out to buy gift cards or similar instead of
| wasting their drop accounts.
|
| Even if only one in 1000 calls returns $100k, they're
| still averaging $100 per call.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please edit swipes and putdowns out of your HN
| comments? This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| Your comment would be fine with just the last two paragraphs,
| which make your substantive point.
| nostromo wrote:
| You've missed the legal / regulatory side of things.
|
| Apparently this has just recently changed, but telcos are
| highly regulated in the US and they are legally required to
| execute calls placed by their customers. This means that they
| have to be very very sure the call should be blocked before
| doing so, otherwise they face legal liability. This regulatory
| structure means that call spamming in the US is all but legally
| protected.
|
| Compare this to less-regulated email, where Gmail and other
| providers are free to block spam based on any reason: source
| ip, domain, content of the email, etc.
| javajosh wrote:
| So, I realize this is a big ask - but can you please write this
| up as a story and sent it to a major news outlet? My cynicism
| is already high, but I would not have suspected _this_ of all
| things, that telcos would allow the elderly to be victimized to
| the tune of $10B to make a few pennies.
|
| Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| >Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal
|
| Most of the losses (in $ terms) from these scams do not
| involve gift cards. They involve the scammers convincing you
| to install some remote desktop software and emptying your
| bank account.
|
| It's already illegal to send people to open bank accounts
| with fake IDs, but the scammers have no problem cashing out
| the bulk of their profits like that.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| How do they get the big bucks out of the last bank?
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| Sometimes they transfer to a cryptocurrency exchange,
| sometimes they go to a branch to withdraw everything.
| Banks don't really like either of those, so issuing
| checks and cashing them somewhere else is a common
| scheme.
|
| Some may bounce the money through a few accounts and
| eventually into a business account that'll send it
| overseas, it depends.
|
| The people on the ground are random replaceable idiots.
| saxonww wrote:
| My grandmother got talked into mailing cash between the pages
| of a magazine. I don't really know what to say other than the
| format of the money doesn't matter too much, someone is going
| to try to scam people out of it, and the scams are going to
| work.
| alexb_ wrote:
| "Make a way you can use money without being tracked by
| everybody illegal" is not a good thing
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal
|
| And when scammers go back to using Western Union are you
| going to ban that as well? When they ask a person to send
| them cash are you going to ban cash as well? Hell let's just
| ban all money to prevent this.
| zinclozenge wrote:
| > Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.
|
| You might be on to something here.
| javajosh wrote:
| I want gift cards banned not because of scammers. Like pay-
| day loan services, gift cards are based on the fraud of
| profound information asymmetry. Gift cards make liquid cash
| worse in almost every dimension. It's tied to one supplier.
| It can be lost. I forgot the stats, but I'm positive
| _billions_ spent on gift cards are never redeemed.
|
| Gift cards are just slightly less evil than payday loan
| services. They take advantage of a (positive) human need to
| give, and a (negative) human need to not work hard, picking
| out a gift, and a (negative) need to appear to have
| purchased a gift when one, in fact, has not. What makes it
| even more evil is that because it's a gift the loss is not
| seen as important for the giver (they gave it away after
| all) or the receiver (they weren't expecting to have this
| thing). The burden on the receiver, to carry around this
| extra piece of plastic, having to remember to use it,
| possibly even _altering your behavior_ to use it, makes it
| even more nefarious.
|
| I don't think my position is particularly common. Certainly
| gift card industry fraud is low on the list of societies
| pressing problems. But it _is_ a problem and one that I
| wish was better understood .
| [deleted]
| ligerzer0 wrote:
| What blows my mind is scammers can spoof real people's phone
| numbers... Like shouldn't that be a top priority to shut down ?
| nurettin wrote:
| > There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical
| mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it
|
| What are these easy few regulatory/technical mechanisms?
| zackmorris wrote:
| This is a classic example of an unintended consequence of
| deregulation.
|
| Normally we could petition our elected officials and get
| something done about it. But lobbyists have come to so
| completely dominate our legislative process that whole
| industries have effectively coopted the government through
| regulatory capture.
|
| On top of that, they've hoodwinked half the population into
| thinking that regulation bad.
|
| At this point, we can all remain hypervigilant and snoop on our
| grandparents and get sucked into various private industry scams
| like identity insurance. We can play games with switching
| carriers within the duopolies in our areas when they let
| scammers steal from us. We can project loudly on social media
| when someone across the world steals right from out of our bank
| accounts, and haggle with our credit card companies to charge
| it back and rip off some merchant so that we don't have to pay.
| This is how scams metastasize into protection rackets and
| authoritarianism.
|
| Or we could like, make this all illegal and charge carriers
| directly when it happens. But that would cost rich people
| money. So rich people run propaganda campaigns to convince us
| that fines just get passed on to consumers. Which doesn't make
| any sense in a free market, where we could switch to a cheaper
| carrier that didn't get fined.
|
| Once we see this from that meta level (that political
| controversy is rooted in misdirection and lies) it just gets so
| tiring to watch the same debates over and over. Maybe we need
| some rich people to step up and call out this nonsense (dragons
| give up their loot so easily). Maybe we need to organize and
| start some consumer unions that dictate to vendors how much
| we'll pay for their services until they shape up. Maybe we
| should get back to our geek roots and start a free peer to peer
| wireless network.
|
| Huh, writing out this rant, I just had a thought. Where's the
| keystone in this? Political progress can't be hacked, so none
| of our instincts around quick fixes work. In other words, the
| half of the population that has the working solution has to
| somehow convince the other half to go along with it. That can
| be a long and painful process spanning decades.
|
| So what does the other half want? What concession to them would
| result in getting legislation passed to solve this?
| nostromo wrote:
| Telcos are one of the most regulated industries in existence.
|
| And as I point out in my sibling comment, bad regulation is
| the reason this problem exists: because telcos are not
| legally able to block most spam calls. If not for this
| regulation, telcos would have solved spam callers long ago by
| blocking suspected sources of spam. (Instead, they do work-
| arounds like labeling them "scam likely.")
| [deleted]
| zackmorris wrote:
| That sounds plausible, I can understand that carriers
| shouldn't filter traffic, because that goes against net
| neutrality. So it sounds like carriers can't block traffic
| at their level, but can attach metadata that the end user
| can block. I did a quick search on how that would work and
| found this info from Robokiller (no affiliation):
|
| https://www.robokiller.com/robocall-blocking-technology
|
| Under the _Governmental backing_ turndown arrow:
|
| _We're fighting behind the scenes to get government
| support for better fighting robocalls. The FCC's TRACED Act
| is just one piece of legislation we're behind that will
| increase penalties for robocallers-but there's far more
| work that needs to be done._
|
| I realized a TL;DR of my rant after writing it:
|
| Organized crime is stealing from members of the community
| and the police rarely succeed in returning stolen property.
| The mayor claims to be trying to help, but mostly works at
| reelection. Half the community wants to pass a law to fine
| a middleman who sees crime occurring but does little to
| stop it. The other half claims that the law itself
| facilitates the crime and wants to cancel more laws. Some
| people hire a watchdog to prevent the crime, and that seems
| to work. Others feel that if the crime affects the whole
| community, then a solution should be part of the commons,
| because vulnerable and/or impoverished members of the
| community would be left defenseless otherwise.
|
| I'm in that second camp. I feel that a conservative
| argument here is: if I have to be bothered by every little
| thing because the government can't do its job to defend the
| community and the security of its property, then that's not
| a republic, it's anarchy.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I gave you an upvote even though I'm going to disagree with
| you. In general, I'm very open-market and low-regulation -
| however in this particular case you're touching on the idea
| of a "common carrier," which is an important idea.
|
| When you have one (or a small number of) providers, in a
| high-barrier-to-entry industry, that provides a critical
| service - this gives these providers enormous power over us
| if they were to refuse to do business with us or charge us
| higher rates. Think water, electric, shipping/postal,
| internet access, telco, etc.
|
| What if the postal service decided to stop doing business
| with you, perhaps because of the offensive content of the
| letters you want to send? Or nobody will ship your
| merchandise because they don't approve of it? Or your
| internet provider cancels you? And what if there are a
| small number of them that collude on these bans, so now you
| can't even switch providers?
|
| By designating certain industries as "common carriers" it
| prohibits them from denying service to anyone for any
| reason, except for particularly obvious, egregious and
| illegal reasons.
|
| If you want to send out Nazi propaganda newsletters to
| people who have requested them - the US Postal Service will
| (and should, I believe) deliver them for you.
|
| We should not allow telcos to decide who's calls to put
| through. This is a job for legislators and law enforcement,
| however imperfect those solutions are.
| chinabot wrote:
| Scam calls are already criminal what more regulation is
| required?
| supertrope wrote:
| The FCC gave the green light to blocking spam in June 2019.
| https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2019/06/05/beating-
| back.... This resolved AT&T's concern/excuse that their
| legal obligation to connect all calls included spam.
| [deleted]
| Diesel555 wrote:
| Anyone claiming "deregulation" for the names sake is speaking
| rhetoric without knowledge. Both conservative and liberal
| economists agree with regulation. The most conservative of
| economists understand the concept of externalities. Call
| centers bear a clear externality. The business transaction
| between the telecom Company and the caller bears a negative
| externality on the callee who is not a member of that
| transaction. Conservative economists would also agree with
| regulation to at least impose a cost on the transaction to
| reflect that externality. The problem is with policy and
| lobbying as you stated - write your member of congress.
|
| To comment on a now deleted post to this comment: I'm not
| arguing that bad regulation doesn't exist which can
| perpetuate and help continue market failures. I'm arguing
| that good regulation is the fix to known market failures and
| economists on both sides recognize that.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The most conservative of economists understand the
| concept of externalities.
|
| Even conservative economists (and for that matter, also
| other experts) usually aren't dumb, but I've _never_ seen
| one of them act on their knowledge appropriately. They all
| prioritize their ideology and their donors, some of them
| even refuse to listen to science and facts when people die
| by the masses.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I've never seen one of them act on their knowledge
| appropriately
|
| Milton Friedman
| spyder wrote:
| It will get worse with the advancement of AI and could scam the
| less vulnerable people too for example by voice cloning from few
| minutes of a voice sample of your friends or relatives. There was
| a CEO of a company who already got scammed in a similar way:
|
| https://www.identityiq.com/scams-and-fraud/scammers-use-ai-g...
|
| And the even more scary thing will be when they will be able to
| use a ChatGPT like AI to automate the whole thing in the future.
| bdr wrote:
| Crazy idea: a red team for hire that tries to scam your relatives
| (but doesn't actually go through with it). Seems like the most
| effective way to teach people what to look out for.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I apologize for the controversial and maybe inflammatory opinion,
| but it's my reaction and thought on the issue. How much more were
| the American people just fleeced by Congress for this money that
| was sent to Ukraine? 10x more money. No one can scam the American
| people like our own government.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Indians, and is entirely a failure of
| the FCC to regulate the legacy phone system. The tech industry
| solved e-mail spam, why can't they be allowed to do the same for
| phones?
| mwint wrote:
| [flagged]
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I know you're joking, but you might not want to try that with a
| nuclear power.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Horrible. There's folks on YouTube who try to prevent victims
| from getting fleeced but many many many get scammed.
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am a person of Indian origin.
|
| I personally do not think reprimanding India will solve this. If
| somehow India stops this the void will be filled by scammers from
| some other country.
|
| This calls for reforms in telecommunications systems /
| regulations / norms / protocols.
| tigeroil wrote:
| Thing is, there's other nationalities who quite frankly would
| probably be a lot more effective at coming off as convincing to
| potential victims, especially given the unfortunate effect this
| has had on the Indian people's reputation.
|
| The fact that we haven't really seen anything near the level of
| Indian call centres tells me that this is unlikely.
|
| I'm not saying that scammers don't exist in other countries,
| but that it's very rare to see anything with the level of
| sophistication and organisation that we see in India.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _If somehow India stops this the void will be filled by
| scammers from some other country._
|
| As if those would-be scammers in other countries presently
| don't scam.. because Indians do? How do Indians presently
| scamming stop would-be scammers in other countries from doing
| the same? That's nonsensical.
|
| Face the facts, this is an India problem. Harsh economic
| sanctions against India are necessary to solve this problem,
| and if that fails, null routing India and the whole of South
| Asia if necessary. And if diplomacy fails, escalation to
| military strikes against Indian telecom infrastructure would be
| in order.
| coding123 wrote:
| Best advice: don't have an area code that matches where you are.
| when you start getting calls from Houston (for example) you know
| it's spam/scam. But when you get calls from the area code you are
| actually in, it's legit.
| golemiprague wrote:
| [dead]
| yalogin wrote:
| The telcos have all my info, name, ssn, address everything. They
| can easily prevent all of this. These spammers generate revenue
| for the telcos and so for them spoofing calls is a service they
| are providing and don't want to remove that "feature"
| teatree wrote:
| Is there any way to coerce the Indian government to take action
| on this? Looking at YouTube videos where these scammers literally
| run corporate offices to steal from old and financially
| vulnerable people is heartbreaking.
| aravindgp wrote:
| All telcos in don't allow number spoofing. No matter what is your
| requirement. Indian telcos don't allow for number spoofing. The
| same rules must be implemented in every country, it's just
| ridiculous that in this day and age open robbery using telephone
| is still being allowed. Nobody should have that facility period.
| You must one number per customer no matter how many lines you
| take. The ability to change number should be next to impossible.
| Everything stops with this one change. Number spoofing must be
| stopped from all countries.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| Just to put things in perspective: for ~350 years (1600-1949),
| the West dominated and exploited India. The British taught the
| Indians that it was OK to steal from another nation. And they
| taught them English too.
|
| What goes around comes around.
| robofanatic wrote:
| Checkout Jamtara on Netflix. a great series about this.
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this scale.
| At the bare minimum they're at least looking the other way.
|
| My grandparents are the targets for this kind of scam, and when
| they call their bank they get an Indian customer service rep to
| discuss the situation with. Absolutely disgusting that the
| situation has been tolerated for so long.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| What's wrong with getting an Indian customer service rep?
| ToxicMegacolon wrote:
| > These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this
| scale. At the bare minimum they're at least looking the other
| way.
|
| Its more like 1. They don't care 2. Those who care, don't have
| time to work on problems of Non-Citizens when the citizens are
| suffering too
|
| India is a country of almost 1.4 Billion people. That is 1
| Europe + 1 North America + around 200 Million people more
| (figures from google search, may not be accurate)
|
| Indian law enforcement is archaic, understaffed, and riddled
| with corruption. They prefer to sit on their asses all day and
| collect paychecks rather than working. For the select few that
| actually work, they have all the local issues to deal with that
| comes with a population of that size. They simply do not have
| the time to work on things that are affecting someone on the
| other side of the planet.
|
| And tbh I don't blame them for putting citizen's problems over
| non-citizens. Thats literally what every country would do.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Indian law enforcement is archaic, understaffed, and
| riddled with corruption...And tbh I don't blame them for
| putting citizen's problems over non-citizens. Thats literally
| what every country would do.
|
| Not to mention consistently and effectively prosecuting
| people for this sort of crime takes two sides of law
| enforcement to tango (the perpetrator of the crime may be in
| India, but the victim is in the United States, as is the
| local police report they file, the spoofed number and the
| first part of the telco chain that eventually ends up in a
| normal looking office in an Indian city). _Sometimes_ a
| relevant Indian police department may get that information in
| a form which is useful to both shut down operations and
| punish the operators, but even if the Indian police were
| incorruptible, a model of efficiency and particularly hot on
| white collar crimes committed overseas, I 'm not sure their
| US counterparts are providing so much information that
| scammers wouldn't feel they could get away with it often
| enough to try.
| user3939382 wrote:
| They're state sponsored at the local level. Local law
| enforcement is underpaid and gets huge bribes from these call
| centers. At the national level India doesn't have the law
| enforcement resources to stop it with local law enforcement
| working against them. It's a mess.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this
| scale.
|
| I'd argue that one such state is the U.S.
|
| Congress could pretty trivially order that carriers give each
| customer a choice about what kinds of spoofed / unreliable-
| origin calls to let through.
|
| E.g.: For calls originating (inside | outside) the U.S.:
| (allow-all | allow-whitelist-only | allow-only-when-presenting-
| callee-issued-passcode | etc.)
|
| But Congress doesn't do this.
|
| This isn't exactly Congress _sponsoring_ this behavior, but I
| suspect there 's some bribery and/or unsavory lobbying going
| on.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> But Congress doesn 't do this._
|
| My own thesis, is because politicians, and PACs, use
| robocalls extensively.
|
| They don't want you blocking _their_ junk calls.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > My own thesis, is because politicians, and PACs, use
| robocalls extensively.
|
| I doubt it, its easy enough for them to just exempt their
| own calls (which, incidentally, they _do_ from existing Do-
| Not-Call rules.)
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| It is actually netflix doing this, so that they get more
| content for jamtara season 3
| factorialboy wrote:
| > These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this
| scale.
|
| How so?
| nigerianbrince wrote:
| I doubt it. It's < 0.003% of indian gdp.
| debarshri wrote:
| It is not just Americans who affected by these scams. It is also
| Indian elderly population too who are affected by these scams. I
| think Indian authorities are very slow to react to these issues
| because police dont really understand the impact these calls
| make. Also they are paid off and are often of part of the mafia
| that runs them. My parent's friends have also been scammed. The
| Netflix series "Jamtara" really shows how intertwined these scams
| are with political system. The intent of these mafia and
| political groups is purely money and there is anti American
| sentiment that drives them.
| rockyj wrote:
| Exactly. At one level, the Indian political system is a
| politician-criminal nexus. The politicians are supported by
| money flowing in from shady systems, the politicians allow
| shady systems to run and use the money to win elections. Rinse
| and repeat.
|
| Then there are some variations of these - e.g. the politician
| and criminal is the same person or in the same family, the
| criminal also does some legit work, the criminal does mostly
| legit work and lot of it is goverment projects or projects
| running on tax money (which are done badly or subcontracted and
| money flows back partly as kick-backs).
|
| This cycle is hard to break unless some serious reforms are
| brought it, but then why would the politicians break the very
| system which brings them so much power and money.
| jesuscript wrote:
| They wouldn't break the system because it's one of the few
| systems that works in that country (I'm taking a amoral
| stance here).
|
| Even the "good" systems don't work, like water, electricity,
| or traffic/transportation. So whatever, I can see why they
| are okay with a "bad" but working system.
|
| Nonetheless, it's quite dysfunctional.
| LegitShady wrote:
| The police in India understand. They are corrupt and paid off,
| so it continues.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| So many of these scam call center operators masquerade as
| honest businessmen, even winning local awards. Sickening.
| balls187 wrote:
| To temper the potential for anti-indian rhetoric, US authorities
| work side by side with local Indian authorities to shut these
| down.
|
| Mark Rober has a few videos dedicated to going after several of
| these scam call centers, and most recently 3 major ones were shut
| down and their owners arrested.
| petepete wrote:
| Those videos by Mark Rober mainly build on the work done by Jim
| Browning.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning/featured
|
| ScammerPayback also does an incredible job.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@ScammerPayback
| weakfortress wrote:
| "Anti-Indian rhetoric"? The scams _literally_ originate in
| India, and are masterminded by Indians. Further, the police are
| often paid off and rarely do anything about it. When enough
| fuss is caused about one or two they stop them and then another
| two crop up somewhere else. If you study the history of
| organized crime, especially in America, this mirrors the
| Italian mob once they got control of the police. This is
| organized crime perpetrated specifically against one nation (at
| scale) and should be treated as such.
| balls187 wrote:
| You missed my point.
|
| These call centers are a problem.
|
| One that requires cooperation between the US and India to
| resolve.
| pauldenton wrote:
| How did the US cooperate with an Italian state that was in
| the pocket of the La Cosa Notra?
| honkler wrote:
| yeah. we'll sanction india, and then india will cooperate.
| balls187 wrote:
| So do you believe the Indian government is complicit in
| such cyber crimes?
| kristopolous wrote:
| Different replier - no but they're incompetently handling
| the problem because these call centers haven't seemed to
| pop up elsewhere
|
| Now before you say "well India has high English
| proficiency" countries like Nigeria, Kenya and the
| Philippines best India here with higher English
| proficiency and don't have the issue (Nigeria has a
| similar email one of course) They're quite a bit poorer
| as well.
|
| There's some major policy failure here India needs to
| figure out. Of course they don't want rampant crime but
| everything points to how they're domestically handling
| that crime as the problem here.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| Just like how sanctioning china is working out right?
| AdityaSanthosh wrote:
| [flagged]
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Just live abroad for a bit and you'll notice a trend.
|
| Here in Australia, I get maybe 4-5 Indian scam calls a
| week, compared to maybe one per year originating from
| anywhere else (Philippines, Eastern Europe).
| kepler1 wrote:
| I'm sorry but suggesting Mark Rober is helping to stop the
| scamming industry in India is like helping Ukraine by adding
| sprinkles to a cupcake at an elementary school bake sale.
| tester457 wrote:
| The awareness is more helpful than you think, many people I
| know were only introduced to how massive that industry is
| because of Mark
| balls187 wrote:
| Every sprinkle helps.
|
| But no that wasn't what I was suggesting.
| typingmonkey wrote:
| Mark Rober also gets support from the LA police while they do
| not care about normal peoples theft.
| balls187 wrote:
| Resource constraints are a problem across all industries.
|
| My recollection wrt Rober was the police aided him to help
| drive awareness.
|
| For the "normal peoples theft" what would you like to police
| to do?
| jen20 wrote:
| > For the "normal peoples theft" what would you like to
| police to do?
|
| - show up when called.
|
| - if they're not going to show up, AT LEAST call back.
|
| - make at least a token effort to apprehend someone of whom
| there is a clear video.
|
| This does not seem to be outlandish expectations of the
| service provided by the largest line in city budget.
| balls187 wrote:
| My guess is there are so many instances of "normal people
| theft" occurring that even calling back is a significant
| scale issue.
|
| Basically, our criminal justice system is not built to
| handle minor crimes, and criminal organizations are
| exploiting that at scale.
| sneak wrote:
| Somehow they still manage to write people a lot of
| tickets, something that generates revenue for the police,
| and steal the money of legal marijuana businesses,
| something else that generates revenue for the police.
|
| There are no consequences to the police for ignoring the
| parts of the job that do not directly generate revenue
| for the police.
|
| This is not an overarching problem with "the criminal
| justice system" other than the fact that the police
| almost everywhere in the US have a culture of graft and
| rentseeking, and won't do anything if there isn't money
| or press involved.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| They could also stop civil asset forfeiture - in 2014
| that surpassed burglary in the US as the top form of
| theft by value. Without being charged or convicted of any
| crime police can take cash and property, which can then
| be sold for funding. The case is brought against the
| property instead of the individual, and then to get it
| back they have to prove the innocence that it wasn't used
| in a crime, rather than the state having to prove that it
| was.
| 2143 wrote:
| I fully agree that these scammers must be prosecuted.
|
| Just a couple of things:
|
| 1. I don't think there's any official conspiracy by Indians in
| general to screw over Americans.
|
| So kindly don't put out poorly thought out responses calling for
| blanket ban on Indians or things like that.
|
| 2. Indians themselves get scammed by these scammers.
|
| That's all. Carry on.
| redsummer wrote:
| [dead]
| miohtama wrote:
| The title is incorrect. If you read the original article it is
| clear that $10B is all US online fraud together, not Indian call
| centers as Deccandherald.com writes
|
| > The trend is persisting, with total money lost by Americans in
| all internet/call centre-related frauds in the last 11 months
| having been estimated at $10.2 billion, an increase of 47%
| against last year's $6.9 billion.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Check out kitboga on YouTube for some hilarious scamming the
| scammer videos. The guy tries to waste as much of the scammer's
| time as possible and he's quite good at it. Of course there's
| only so much one person can do, but he does seem to be doing more
| than the entire US law enforcement apparatus combined.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I find that a majority of our incoming calls are scams. Surprised
| that Google/Apple haven't fixed this at the behest of the
| government.
| cgh wrote:
| Our phone provider has a free service, Call Control, that's
| completely eliminated scam calls. Callers get an automated
| message asking them to enter a random number. If they enter it
| correctly, my phone rings as usual. This system foils automated
| calling services, at least for now.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The problem with services like this is that some automated
| calls are legitimate.
| cgh wrote:
| Legit automated services tend to be opt-in and allow me to
| specify sms, eg our provincial health service notifying us
| about vaccine availability.
| supertrope wrote:
| Most "legitimate" robocalls from a school or doctor's
| office are better off as SMS. Does an appointment reminder
| really need my immediate undivided attention? If it's not
| worth having an employee manually make the call it's
| probably not worth my time to answer.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Sure, maybe they _should be_ that way. But until they
| _are_ that way, this doesn 't seem like a feasible
| solution.
| civilized wrote:
| I have a convenient heuristic which I imagine is quite common.
| I have a cell phone with an area code from where I purchased
| it, but I have since moved, so all my local calls come from a
| different area code.
|
| Calls from my area code of residence are almost never spam,
| while calls from any other area code, and especially my phone's
| area code, are almost always spam.
| arcticfox wrote:
| I have the exact same situation and it works wonders. Pretty
| ridiculous that it takes a complete fluke of personal history
| to solve the call spam.
| poxrud wrote:
| I'm in Canada and a lot of my spam calls come from a number
| very similar to mine, with only the last 4 digits changed.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I believe both Android and iOS support SHAKEN/STIR, as long as
| your carrier supports it. On my phone, at least, I see Caller
| IDs tagged with "likely spam" if a check fails.
| jen20 wrote:
| Both Google Fi and T Mobile used to show up likely spam calls
| regularly and accurately, but sadly the only network with
| decent coverage where I live is AT&T, which does exactly as
| good a job of this as you'd expect AT&T to do.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Figures :-)
|
| I wonder if this is a rollout thing -- I had AT&T for
| years, and towards the end (about a year ago) I began
| receiving spam notices. But I was in one of their "primary"
| markets, so it's possible they rolled it out first here.
| VectorLock wrote:
| As an aside, they really did some Olympic level gymnastics to
| backronym SHAKEN: Signature-based Handling of Asserted
| information using toKENs.
| nerdix wrote:
| Google does have a bunch of features for screening spam calls.
|
| It can identify scammers' numbers (based on user reports). And
| the phone app will label the call as suspected spam.
|
| There is also a setting to outright block incoming calls from
| numbers labeled as spammers.
|
| Then there is call screening. The google bot will answer the
| call and ask questions that you select (like "who are you and
| why are you calling?"). You get a real time voice transcription
| of the answer so that you can decide to pick up if needed. But
| it's handy for spammers because they usually just hang up (or
| you get some half-transcripted text of a robocall message that
| was talking over the Google bot).
|
| It doesn't solve the problem completely but it does help.
| regnull wrote:
| Google had a perfect solution for this, Google Voice (formerly
| Grand Central). This amazing product was languishing for years
| due to the lack of attention on Google side. They don't let it
| die, but it doesn't look like they let it live, either. Shame,
| could be a total game changer.
| smcn wrote:
| This is the last time you'll find me praise Google but the
| "Screen Call" button has been a godsend for me, I haven't had
| to talk to a scammer in years at this point. Nobody makes it
| past the first couple of words.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| Is it bad that I don't feel sorry for the Americans getting
| scammed given the obscene wealth inequality that exists between
| the two countries? Some wealth shifting to a poor country with
| millions of malnourished people might actually be a net positive
| to the world? Morality is complicated for sure.
| potamic wrote:
| It's not bad, it's reprehensible. Notwithstanding the fact that
| there are about a dozen moral qualms about this line of
| thinking, the economic conditions of the countries have little
| bearing on the economic situations of individuals in this
| interaction.
|
| I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of
| the people they are scamming. And given their criminal
| backgrounds, they are likely to do more harm than unintended
| good to the people around them. Remember Gandhi who once said,
| "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".
| frontman1988 wrote:
| If only Gandhi's idealism was even somewhat practical. This
| is what he thought about the Jews: "Hitler killed five
| million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But
| the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's
| knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from
| cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of
| Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their
| millions."
|
| The world is not a fair place. Morality doesn't get you fed,
| doesn't get you proper education or healthcare. And when you
| don't have proper opportunities to earn money the right way,
| it's tough not rationalizing scamming other people to get
| your basic needs fullfilled. Overall it's a good thought
| experiment to imagine what all we would have done if we were
| not born with our current privilege. I personally feel people
| are only as good as the world allows them to be.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| In these types of call centers, nobody is malnourished. The
| people making the calls are probably making a pretty meager
| salary (let's say $300 a month) and the singular company owner
| takes in all profits, and spends it on BMWs, his 10 pieces of
| land, and his 20 other unrelated business ventures.
| modriano wrote:
| I don't think this is a complicated moral issue, and it takes
| some really sloppy thinking to see any ambiguity here.
|
| Defrauding individual people out of their savings is bad, even
| if the victims live in an expensive country that's home to some
| very wealthy citizens (like the US), and the criminals live in
| a country that's home to some very poor citizens (like India).
| How could the existence of poverty in India make it moral for
| college educated Indian scammers who live lavishly on the
| stolen savings of Americans [0] (youtube has plenty of scammer
| channels that show scammers are mostly college educated Indians
| who never, ever give the money to the poor and malnourished)?
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/rfX8ZlBK0Uo?t=635
| AntoniusBlock wrote:
| How much do you make per year?
| prhn wrote:
| > Is it bad that I don't feel sorry for the Americans getting
| scammed
|
| yes
| frontman1988 wrote:
| Have you been to India and seen the absolute squalour and
| poverty that exists? I guess the net happiness in the world
| increases everytime some poor indian scams an american. The
| american is momentarily pissed off and wiser about scams,
| while the Indian has got a lot of money that will improve his
| living standards considerably.
| modriano wrote:
| Not every American is wealthy, and none of the Indian
| scammers are the Indians living in absolute poverty. Have a
| look at this scammer and his resume [0] and tell me how
| this college educated criminal defrauding Americans who
| aren't very tech savvy "increases the net happiness of the
| world"?
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/EapyNrHp9xo?t=400
| notsound wrote:
| These scam call centers aren't owned by glorious socialist
| warriors, they're owned by comparatively wealthy individuals
| that pay their workers far less than the profit of their labor
| and often hold them under terrible working conditions. Also,
| yes feeling bad for old people losing their life savings is the
| correct position (america doesn't exactly accommodate for
| people without money).
| _bohm wrote:
| I understand the impulse to feel this way, but redistributing
| wealth through criminal syndicates who likely contribute very
| little real value to the Indian economy is not the way to go.
| ramadan_steve wrote:
| [dead]
| eikenberry wrote:
| [flagged]
| oefrha wrote:
| Once upon a time banning opium in your own country was an act
| of war. The bar was so low it's practically meaningless.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| While maybe an act of war is too harsh, we should be hitting
| them hard economically.
| weakfortress wrote:
| The police in India are paid off to allow this. Indeed, the
| best solution would be economic sanctions on India until it
| is resolved.
| ideavalodation wrote:
| I don't support any kinda scam to begin with but what
| should other countries do to USA for exporting MLMs, ponzi
| scheme, crypto scams and other trash
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I was looking for the perfect analogy and this is it -
| would India and other countries be justified for
| sanctioning the US government for something private
| companies did? Sanctions are something governments do to
| each other and this is an issue between private citizens.
| It just gets messy because it's international, but AFAIK
| we can't do anything from the US aside from investigating
| to get suspects then requesting extradition.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The Indian government is pretty clearly complicit. At a
| large enough scale, there is no difference between
| permitting something and encouraging that thing. And
| other countries are free to impose economic sanctions on
| the USA for the shitty things it allows/encourages US
| companies to do.
|
| If there is a market incentive for companies to do
| something bad, and the government can, but does not act
| to correct/neutralize that incentive, then the government
| should be blamed. India is a democracy, so that blame
| also falls on the electorate.
|
| As a US voter I grudgingly accept my ~4e-9 proportion of
| the blame for the shitty things the US allows.
| notahacker wrote:
| Just because people come from the country that gave the
| world Enron, Bernie Madoff and FTX and celebrates the
| exploits of Frank Abagnale and Jordan Belfort doesn't
| necessarily mean they can't feel that foreigners are
| somehow much more complicit in crimes committed by their
| fellow countrymen...
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| That sounds an attack on the people of India for something
| a private company is doing. I also don't think the US has
| jurisdiction there, so I'd much rather see an investment in
| education or public infrastructure to help with it.
|
| If this was similar to the Russia stuff where the goal was
| to affect the election and was sponsored by the govt then
| sanctions kinda make sense, but this is a problem of
| international communication between private citizens. If we
| wanted to make some law for this that seems cool but it'd
| need to be done at the UN, not in the US
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Why should the US invest in Indian education and
| infrastructure when India, by its inaction, is
| responsible for such parasitism against US citizens? It
| sucks that sanctions would cause collateral damage, but
| India is a democracy. No voting citizen is absolved of
| guilt.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I'm saying we should invest in educating people in the US
| to stop falling for the scams, or for infrastructure to
| stop in here in the US.
|
| As another comment notes, the US is responsible for
| plenty of parasitism (MLMs, ponzi, crypto) that is likely
| a higher total value, but I suspect most citizens would
| feel it's unfair to sanction them because of some bad
| actors in the economy
| weakfortress wrote:
| [flagged]
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I think this is an "ought VS is" thing - I know
| realistically the US could just hit people until they
| agree, but this is something that would need to be
| handled by an international governing body. If someone in
| NY scams someone in CA, CA can't just unilaterally
| prosecute them, it becomes a federal crime because it's
| across state lines. Similarly this is between countries
| and I don't know if we even have international laws for
| stuff like this, so it may not even be truly illegal. The
| US could request extradition but I think that's the
| extent of the legal actions the government could take.
| dymk wrote:
| > That sounds an attack on the people of India for
| something a private company is doing.
|
| It's the responsibility of the Indian government to
| police what happens within its borders. The Indian
| government has turned blind eye to scammers in their
| country targeting the US, they're effectively endorsing
| it.
|
| Why should the US continue to do business with a country
| that leeches off of the US citizenry?
|
| Historically, the US has done the same thing to Japan,
| and more recently, China, when their businesses undermine
| US businesses. Either by not respecting US IP or by
| running US businesses under through collusion.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I don't agree with the Russian sanctions, you're doing
| collective punishment on a population of people, many of
| whom presumably don't even support the war. It may be an
| effective strategy but that alone doesn't justify it
| dymk wrote:
| How do you punish and manipulate a government without
| punishing its people, either as a side effect or direct
| goal?
|
| Even if you come up with some way to somehow target
| specifically how the government functions but entirely
| spare the citizens from externalities, the government
| will just hold its citizenry "hostage".
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I don't think we should be coercing their government to
| do anything, we should educate our own citizenry, build
| infrastructure to protect against it, lobby the
| international community to make a legal process for it,
| or all three
| api wrote:
| How many people in India have lost money to crypto scams
| based in the US or US-aligned places? The US has sports
| arenas named after crypto Ponzi schemes.
|
| This is a global problem. It boils down to the Internet and
| modern telco networks opening up cheap ways to address many
| millions of people, allowing scammers to troll for marks at
| scale. Gift cards, easy wire transfers, in-app purchases,
| easy card charges, and crypto have made it easy to get
| money from people with low friction too.
| listless wrote:
| It's certainly a major criminal enterprise harbored by a
| foreign government. What's the protocol here?
| ridicter wrote:
| It's gotten bad enough that if someone with an Indian accent is
| calling me and it sounds like it's from a call center, I hang up
| immediately.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| Another giveaway is an extra pause before they start talking.
| This is call software that lets them dial a bunch of numbers at
| once until someone answers and it switches the person that
| answered over to an available headset.
|
| If you answer and say hello and there's an extra second just
| hang up. They'll call back if it is important.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| I honestly just literally never answer the phone unless its
| already in my contacts. If it's so important, they'll leave a
| message.
|
| If the message mentions anything about stupid stuff like tax
| fraud/social security number its just immediately deleted,
| you'd 99% of the time receive official mail for anything about
| these items.
| GalenErso wrote:
| I solely answer phone calls from anyone other than friends and
| family, work, and scheduled appointments.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Do you happen to work in a scam call center? If so that seems
| like a reasonable approach!
| DrearyWoods wrote:
| This is my advice to my parents now, who sometimes get anxious
| over the disgracefully manipulative bait these scammers deploy.
|
| "If it's an Indian, hang up."
|
| If there's a legitimate need to get in touch, they will find
| another way. My (naive) hope is that this might also discourage
| offshoring and/or reward companies employing Americans, if
| enough people do likewise.
| bilalnpe wrote:
| >My (naive) hope is that this might also discourage
| offshoring and/or reward companies employing Americans, if
| enough people do likewise.
|
| I doubt that. Instead they'll probably start using a service
| like https://www.respeecher.com/
| dalbasal wrote:
| Diplomats have been MIA on this issue for far too long. This is
| exactly what diplomacy should be good for.
|
| The victims of these crimes aren't in India. It makes sense that
| it would take external pressure to prioritize them.
| pjdemers wrote:
| Wasn't there a guy who was running an IRS scam who was caught,
| tried and convicted and will spend the rest of his life in a US
| supermax prison? And his children, who lived in the US, were
| stripped of their citizenship and deported. The universities
| where his children attended were threatened with receiving stolen
| property and forced to pay all tuition and fees back to the IRS.
| And of course their degrees were revoked.
| [deleted]
| hijinks wrote:
| my wife almost fell for one because she needed to do an amazon
| return.
|
| She Googled "Amazon support phone number" on her phone and the
| 2nd link had a 800 number but it was a site either legit or setup
| by scammers to review the phone number. She called it and figured
| someone was funny when they asked her to install an app on her
| phone.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| I don't shop at Amazon if I can at all help it, so as someone
| unfamiliar with the return flow: this actually sounds expected.
| Telling the person you're trying to scam "It's a new feature
| not built into the main app yet" sounds totally believable, and
| almost expected for a digital-first company like Amazon. And if
| a legacy retailer said the same thing, I would consider them
| mildly slow and fragmented, not necessarily scamming me.
| "Scammer" wouldn't be the first thing to pop into my head.
|
| Combined with how easy it is to get "support" from scammers
| instead of actual companies and high-pressure act-now tactics
| scammers use, and your wife was probably one of the few that
| caught on.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Let me guess, was that search result an ad? Yet another reason
| to block them.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| And even more money has been lost through the horde of
| outsourcing firms such as Infosys and Wipro with low quality
| developers.
| newsclues wrote:
| Fines for the Telcos that enable these scams could resolve this
| issue, but the Telcos make money off this and don't care.
| shockeychap wrote:
| My uncle almost drove two states away to give a stranger $10,000
| because he was duped into believing his grandson had gotten into
| an accident and killed a pregnant woman. The only thing that
| stopped it was that he first needed to borrow the money, which
| led to my involvement. We made some calls and were quickly able
| to confirm that the grandson in question was at home and nowhere
| near the "accident" in question.
|
| My parents have had to cancel their main debit card twice in the
| past year because they've given out the number to someone they
| thought was with their bank.
|
| My neighbor (in her 80s) almost gave her SSN to somebody who
| claimed to be with Social Security.
|
| I knew a guy who lost his entire retirement to scammers and had
| to give up his dream of retiring to Florida.
|
| I'm sad to say it, but it's more dangerous than ever to be old or
| naive. In the old days, the scammers had to come to you. The
| internet has made it trivial to carry out scam operations from
| the other side of the world, and everyone who COULD do something
| (especially the FCC and telcos) seems to be indifferent and
| apathetic.
| patrec wrote:
| > I'm sad to say it, but it's more dangerous than ever to be
| old or naive
|
| It will get orders of magnitude worse once all this can be
| fully automated by AI (including a completely realistic video
| or voice call by the grandson where he talks about killing the
| pregnant woman).
| shockeychap wrote:
| Yes it will.
| grimgrin wrote:
| similar story for me a year ago. grandpa got a call that i was
| in jail for hitting a car and the driver was pregnant. lost her
| baby. they even had "me" talk to them briefly which really got
| em believing. he went to bank and mailed $9500 in cash, to what
| ultimately appeared to be an airbnb
|
| was v sad because he felt supreme humiliation over the matter.
| shockeychap wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear that. It was almost the exact same thing
| with my uncle. When I first started asking questions, he
| tried to assure me it was legit because he had heard his
| grandson talking in the background. My guess is that they had
| somebody sobbing hysterically while talking so as to make it
| hard to recognize that the voice is "off". When you're
| stressed, it's easy to miss that kind of thing, and they
| exploit it.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Happened to my uncle, he records all calls so he was able to
| show us. When they let him speak to "his son" he sounded just
| like him and even used the same greeting his son normally
| does with him. Was very creepy. And his real son had his
| phone turned off during that time.
|
| The really weird bit is they didn't ask him to send any money
| out. They knew his address and some "police" showed up an
| hour later demanding he write them a check.
|
| This is in Canada. They've apparently found the guy, but
| there's some difficulties because he's in a different
| province.
| tsol wrote:
| That sounds so strangely elaborate. I wonder how they fake
| the voice and why they bother to have a second person come
| to the house
| codezero wrote:
| Airbnb must be a hotbed for these sort of things. I had a
| friend in the 90s who would squat at unfinished or unoccupied
| homes while he ran fraud scams, renting an Airbnb seems much
| easier, since these scammers almost certainly rented it with
| a stolen identity.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| A friend?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| It's nightmarish in India too right now. The spam is
| relentless, but they now target Whatsapp messages. Older people
| in India treat Whatsapp as the gospel and believe that anything
| that pops up on Whatsapp is "official".
|
| I've got my parents to essentially keep just the bare minimum
| in their bank accounts, to cancel all debit cards, and keep all
| extra funds in fixed deposits that you can't withdraw from
| online (have to visit the branch).
| Mistletoe wrote:
| It scares me very much that these people vote and the terrible
| state of American politics largely reflects that. If you can't
| have the forethought to call your grandson to see before giving
| someone $10,000, do you have the brain capacity to make an
| intelligent voting choice?
|
| I know this is a tangent to your comment but after seeing my
| parents and others their age do similar things to what you
| describe it makes me wonder about voting and driving with no
| age limits or proof of non-dementia.
| supertrope wrote:
| Yeah there's something off about the person's competence.
| This is not a corrupt country with bag men and personal
| connections trumping law. Anything important is in writing.
| Even if this were a real personal injury tragedy $10K in
| blood money won't make legal problems go away. That's barely
| enough for an ambulance ride, ER examination, and some
| imaging.
|
| Just like email phishing educating the public is very
| laborious but it is the ultimate solution. There will still
| be a few people who fall for scams no matter how extensive
| the PSA campaigns.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem is, education alone won't help. Dementia,
| alzheimer's etc. are _horrible_ , and ffs even experts on
| scams can get scammed like one of the scambaiter Youtubers
| (iirc Jim Browning?).
|
| You need to fix scams at the source: sanction India and
| other countries until they kick up efforts to neutralize
| scammers, and replace insecure systems like SSN.
| elboru wrote:
| It's dangerous to draw lines. Where should we draw the age
| line? 80? 70? 60? I know people in their 70s with better
| cognitive abilities than the average middle age person.
|
| In that case, let's ask for cognitive tests to gain the right
| to vote! Unfortunately there will be people who will never be
| capable of passing the test even during their 20s or 30s.
| Those who cannot pass the test could be less capable thanks
| to the environment (poor neighborhoods, poor education, bad
| childhood, missing one or two parents, exposed to toxic
| chemicals during pregnancy) or simply less lucky in the
| genetic side.
|
| Are we ready to take away the right to vote from old people
| even if they are more capable than you and me? If not, are we
| ready to take away the right to vote from less privileged
| people?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| We already draw a line: those under 18 can't vote. The main
| problem it seems is that we don't know when someone will
| die. /s
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm much much less concerned about senior citizens casting
| their vote than I am about the number of people that get
| their "news" from opinion shows under the banner of news
| programming. Doesn't matter the network, but if you're
| providing opinions, a giant opaque 288pt Impact font overlay
| of the word OPINION should be mandated to be on the screen.
| As long as people are duped into thinking opinions are news,
| we're never going to get a better electorate.
| zarriak wrote:
| Just get a job where you have to pick up every call you get and
| some of them won't be spam!
| willhinsa wrote:
| Congress is asleep at the wheel.
|
| The spice must flow
|
| The coffers leaking doesn't matter when lobbyists fill them back
| up every night
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://www.deccanherald.com/national/americans-
| duped-into-l..., which points to this.
| HamSession wrote:
| A lot is caused by the forwarding services that mask the numbers.
| Really each should be held liable for any damages.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| The calls is one aspect, how they get money out is another. The
| gift card business needs some revamping. It should not be so
| easy to transfer billions every year with no accountability.
| chrisgd wrote:
| That's a good thought. I wonder if there is an aggressive us
| attorney that could tie the forwarders to the scam with some
| kind of RICO charges.
|
| (My entire understanding of law comes from law and order so
| take what i said with a grain of salt)
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I think for that to be meaningful, there would need to be some
| mechanism to prevent fly-by-night operations formed to isolate
| the liability.
|
| Maybe requiring them to post a large bond (proportional to the
| liability) and/or have insurance?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Could someone explain why the reply from @calimac was killed?
|
| I'm guessing it has something to do with the snowshoe-
| spamming reference, but I'm totally in the dark.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| The user is probably blacklisted due to bad past behavior.
| You can vouch for individual comments, though.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Banned by sctb on Oct 16, 2016 for political ranting.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Wouldn't being banned prevent them from posting?
|
| Or does it just insta-kill all their posts?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It just marks all of their posts dead. If you have
| showdead:on set then you can see them, and choose to
| vouch for individual posts if they add value to the
| conversation.
| supertrope wrote:
| Yeah. Robocaller fines are almost never paid.
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/fcc-fined-
| roboca...
| calimac wrote:
| [dead]
| evo_9 wrote:
| Set your phone to silence unknown callers. Completely eliminated
| the issue for me, along with any other random goofball trying to
| call me.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| Maybe systems bare extra costs because of parasitic behaviors.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Just hope your life partner doesn't lock themselves out of the
| house and try to call you from a polite strangers phone.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I use voicemail for that, I still get alerts for a new
| voicemail, and often the scam calls will just move on when
| there isn't an answer, or you can listen and it's pretty easy
| to tell if it's legitimate
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I assume in the parent they still accept voicemails. I'm sure
| your partner would be aware of your policy of not picking up
| unknown numbers and think to leave a voicemail in this
| situation.
| reaperducer wrote:
| There's nothing my wife wants to hear more when she's
| stranded on the side of the road than "Please leave a
| message."
| tjoff wrote:
| This "solution" and mindset completely undermines the utility
| of a phone.
|
| Which at least I think is a grave mistake.
|
| You might argue that you barely use the phone as a phone, and
| that might have been a good argument if there was anything
| remotely equivalent.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Basically blaming the victim, ain't it? The fault is squarely
| with the carriers.
| tjoff wrote:
| I don't think so, two different faults.
| zippergz wrote:
| Also caused me to completely miss an appliance delivery because
| the driver called me from his personal cell, I forgot I had
| "unknown callers" filtered, and he gave up when he couldn't
| reach me. Even though I get way more spam calls than legitimate
| calls, I realized that fully half of the legitimate calls I get
| are from numbers not in my contacts: delivery drivers, doctors
| offices, restaurants confirming reservations, etc. The
| collateral damage of this setting was worse than the scam calls
| for me.
| oefrha wrote:
| Same problem with physical mail in the U.S. 99% of physical
| mail I get is commercial garbage, but I still have to sift
| through them since I don't want to miss the remaining 1% from
| IRS.
| ghaff wrote:
| And emergency calls of various kinds etc. Fortunately it's
| not so bad for me that I'm willing to make myself harder to
| reach for legitimate, and possibly important, purposes.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Should have had them text you.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Yes, he should have totally gone to the dispatch warehouse
| the day before and looked up the delivery driver schedule
| and called the delivery driver at home to let him know that
| when he delivers his appliance the next day, he should text
| instead of call if communication was required the next day.
|
| Or even simpler, put on his Beam-a-Thought helmet and sent
| a message back in time directly into the noggins of every
| delivery driver at the warehouse.
|
| Victim blaming at its most absurd.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Compromise solution --- send unknown callers directly to
| voice mail.
|
| Or better yet, ask them to press a random number to connect
| the call --- before the phone will even ring or go to voice
| mail. This effectively weeds out most auto-dialers.
|
| I have a Panasonic phone (connected to VOIP) that has this
| feature built in. It also has text to speech that reads the
| caller ID out loud. It's amazing how creative these hardware
| vendors have gotten now that their market is shrinking.
|
| Mobile phones have some catching up to do.
| wetpaws wrote:
| There is a solution for this and it's called SMS
| notahacker wrote:
| I'm not convinced the solution to the problem "I'm not able
| to deliver this item because you're not answering the door
| or phone" is to expect delivery drivers to use asynchronous
| communication methods and plan their day around making
| deliveries when people that can't or won't respond
| immediately get around to replying.
|
| I receive more spam SMS than scam calls too. Some of them
| are even asking me to provide information for the benefit
| of fake deliveries...
| phaedrus wrote:
| I just accept the collateral damage of never answering calls.
| Traditional telephone service is dead to anyone under 40.
| evo_9 wrote:
| Exactly, that's why I love this feature. I don't even have
| to ignore the call, it just silently goes to VM.
|
| Worth the occasional missed call IMO; I say on my VM msg if
| you are calling me and I don't know you leave a message
| otherwise your call will go to VM without ringing.
| e1g wrote:
| Anyone under 40, who have no kids, don't run a business,
| have no presence in the community, and socialize only with
| people under 40.
| klysm wrote:
| Potentially a significant proportion of the population
| ianbutler wrote:
| Pretty sure that's actually a significant amount of
| people.
| jacobmartin wrote:
| I have two kids, am self-employed (tutoring) in my
| community, and have many friends and acquaintances are
| over 40 (from church, for instance). Sending unknown
| numbers to voicemail has been completely fine in every
| case. I've never missed an urgent call that I couldn't
| call right back after I read the voicemail transcription.
| e1g wrote:
| By contrast, in December, I had these time-sensitive
| calls from unknown numbers: airline lost luggage
| delivery, Amazon delivery who couldn't get in, my kids'
| doctors, my pharmacy, someone from my accountant's firm,
| a bank rep, and a few organizations returning my call.
| December was a typical month, if a bit slow.
|
| In theory, I could get a voicemail and then follow-up,
| but that would result in significant time wasted for both
| sides (e.g., calling doctors again or setting up re-
| delivery), and the total time I spent on dealing with
| spam calls is ~1 minute (5-10 seconds x 5-10
| occurrences).
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This.
|
| Snail mail is so overloaded with spam it might as well be
| the same.
|
| The fact two fundamental and official mass communication
| channels are functionally useless is a sign of the rot in
| our country.
|
| Email is teetering on the void. Chat is balkanized and
| siloed, same with social media, unlike telephony there is
| no source monopoly or tradition of cross standards.
|
| Txt is the last bastion. It'll die in the next decade I'd
| guess.
| api wrote:
| If it can be used to reach you and the cost of sending
| messages is low or zero, it will be destroyed by spam.
| I'm not sure anything can stop it, even serious dedicated
| police action and regulation.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The fact two fundamental and official mass
| communication channels are functionally useless is a sign
| of the rot in our country._
|
| It's a problem everywhere. This is what you get when you
| let the advertising industry operate unchecked. Scam
| calls and snail mail spam are just piggybacking on the
| fact that phone companies and postal services encourage
| and make money on telemarketing and mass marketing
| e-mails.
|
| It's going to be hard to solve one without solving the
| other, as the difference between those scams and typical
| marketing communication is a matter of degree, not kind.
| distances wrote:
| It is not a problem everywhere. I do not get snail mail
| spam or call spam in Germany. For post it was enough to
| put up a sticker that forbids advertisements. No idea
| really why call/sms spam isn't a problem.
| phaedrus wrote:
| SMS has hung on for three reasons:
|
| 1. Reading a message is low-obligation compared to
| answering a phone or taking physical mail out of a box.
|
| 2. A shorter message has less room to both contain a scam
| and a cover story. Necessarily, either the payload or the
| cover story or both are thinner in an SMS message than a
| scam email.
|
| 3. But most importantly, social customs around text
| messages conversations are different from phone
| etiquette: besides being unauthenticated, caller-id came
| after decades of being expected to answer the phone
| without knowing who was calling or why.
|
| A stranger sending a legitimate but unexpected text
| message feels obligated to explain WTF they're contacting
| you. "You don't know me, but..." Scammers, on the other
| hand, are trying to bypass this. "Oh, you know me."
|
| Tying into point #2, a low-data channel like an SMS
| conversation is a high-context interaction. Have you ever
| gone back and read old SMS conversations and noticed a
| difference between the richness of your memory of the
| interaction and the sparseness of what the text actually
| said?
|
| (Google search results pull the quote, "Generally, high-
| context cultures prefer oral communications, while low-
| context cultures favor written communications." My thesis
| is the telephone is a technology that turns oral
| communication into a low-context activity, and SMS is a
| technology that turned textual communication into a high-
| context activity. It's not impossible but more difficult
| for untargeted scams to go unnoticed in a high context
| channel.)
| deadbunny wrote:
| It's a delivery. Couldn't he have knocked on your door?
| Operyl wrote:
| Drivers I have had in the past just don't want to waste the
| mileage and gas if they can't guarantee that someone will
| be there, which to some extent I can understand even if it
| has caused me to miss delivery windows..
| alistairSH wrote:
| They often call at dispatch time to ensure you're there to
| accept delivery. They don't want to drive out, only to have
| to return the appliance because nobody was home.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I've had several occurrences where a delivery person
| would get all the way to my house, park on my street,
| call my phone, and if I didn't answer, just drive away. I
| don't think it's always about the mileage, sometimes the
| driver is just lazy and wants any excuse to not have to
| do their job.
|
| (It's happened with a package delivery, as well as a
| washing machine installation. In the latter case it was
| Home Depot, when I finally got ahold of them they said it
| was my fault for not answering the phone and that I had
| to reschedule for 2 weeks out, meanwhile I didn't have a
| working washing machine. I cancelled the order instead,
| went to Lowe's and had a washer in a few hours.)
| bluedino wrote:
| If you're home working with noise cancelling headphones on
| chances are you might not hear it
| techwizard81 wrote:
| if you are expecting a delivery, it might be common sense
| to not wear noise cancelling headphones!
| amelius wrote:
| There must be a technological solution to this problem ...
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| There is --- see my post above.
|
| Mobile phones just don't offer it by default --- the best
| most have is a "Do not disturb" setting.
|
| There is a marketing opportunity here for some software
| developer --- lots of people would actually *pay* for a
| mobile app that could effectively weed out auto-dialers
| and/or selectively send only unknown callers directly to
| voice mail without ringing the phone.
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| It's mind-boggling that the United States allows this kind of
| thing to happen.
|
| In the EU I get maybe one spam call every couple of months. From
| the stories you hear from Americans on HN, Americans get multiple
| spam/scam calls a day, and the vast majority of their inbound
| calls are spam/scams.
|
| What is going wrong in the US that isn't going wrong in the EU?
| Language barrier? Regulatory capture?
| Macha wrote:
| Certainly most of my inbound calls in Ireland are scam calls.
| Not sure this is solved EU-wide, maybe just in your specific EU
| country?
|
| As far as I know the solution is to require more anti-spoofing
| techniques (e.g. SHAKEN/STIR) for caller ID and then cut off
| the carriers who don't provide that, plus the carrier providing
| the numbers enforcing stronger terms on their users.
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| I'm in NL, and it seems to be solved here. I'm not sure _how_
| it was solved (or they avoided it becoming a problem in the
| first place), mind you.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A couple of items to our advantage: there are quite a few
| carriers here but only very few of those have physical
| infrastructure and those tend to have strong political
| connections. They are tied in with LE and AIVD at the
| operations level and have excellent security departments
| _and_ a reputation to uphold. Then there is the willingness
| of the local authorities to put time into this, and
| publicize when they nab some of these scammers. And
| finally, NL is a small market with a weird little language
| that isn 't spoken much outside of our borders. (South
| African doesn't count ;) ).
| dahfizz wrote:
| Would you ever expect a legitimate call from your bank /
| government / business to be in English? Particularly
| English with a strong Indian accent?
|
| I think the US gets targeted mostly because of language.
| Indians learn English in school and it's not uncommon for a
| legitimate call in the US to come from someone with a
| strong accent.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| The only anti spoofing technique that works for me is
| restricting calls to people in my contacts. It's a bit of a
| pain with transactional things, but (at least in the US) it
| seems we're long past the days where you could just call
| someone with no warning. I usually get a text or IM first
| now.
| numpad0 wrote:
| EU has the same problem, ja_JP too sans the non-native callers
| part. Maybe just the US is most affected.
|
| 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/europol-
| phone-...
| username_my1 wrote:
| I think it's because of the language.
|
| No one in the EU (outside UK) will receive a call in English
| and think this is legitimate
|
| In the US if you call any company you would expect someone with
| an accent
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| Ireland is also in the EU :)
|
| Here in NL, however, it does seem like scammers are
| occasionally taking advantage of the comparatively high
| English proficiency and are trying to scam people in English
| - this one was doing the rounds for a while:
| https://www.fraudehelpdesk.nl/alert/engels-telefoontje-
| namen...
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm guessing the scammers can't understand the Irish accent
| :-)
| sosull wrote:
| Ah sure look.
| kube-system wrote:
| The US just has large number of people in one country code who
| mostly speak English, have high incomes, a uniform retail
| landscape ("go to CVS and get a Google Play card" works
| everywhere), and an abundance of options for telephony.
|
| It's not like Indian scammers are beholden to EU law but not US
| law.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| We also have policy problems. As previous commenters with
| experience in the industry point out, this problem is easy to
| solve. It's not a technical problem, it's a policy problem.
|
| It's not an ideals problem. Even very conservative economists
| would agree that there exists a negative externality in the
| transaction between the call center and the telecom company
| on the person being called where there should be some cost on
| the transaction to account for that externality.
|
| So, it's not even a conservative liberal thing (intentionally
| not using party names as those names may not reflect
| conservative or liberal ideals). It's a policy problem. Write
| your member of congress.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Nope, the incentives don't work like that.
|
| I regularly get spam calls in Chinese. My best guess is this
| is because if they randomly dial Bay Area area codes they
| sometimes get Chinese people.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| In Germany scam calls often come from callcenters in Turkey.
| There is a huge quantity of people who speak both Turkish and
| German quite well and a small portion of them who for some
| reason or other reside in Turkey now participate in scam
| operations.
|
| Turkey doesn't have much interest in stopping this. One could
| argue they have quite a few bigger problems, crime related or
| not, to try and shut down a source of foreign currency. Same as
| India.
| bluedino wrote:
| It's mind boggling that such a high amount of people are
| willing to pay up whenever they get a call or email
| rootusrootus wrote:
| The fraction is quite low, but when you're pulling from a
| pool of people measured in billions, even a really low
| percentage is good enough.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| I'm getting several per week in Italy, now mostly about Amazon
| stock - previously it used to be mostly about crypto something.
| So boring.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| i get plenty of sms though. very annoying to get it to stop.
| you can reply STOP or whatever they suggest to reply to stop
| the messages but it doesn't seem to do anything.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| As with replying "unsubscribe" to spam messages, replying
| with "stop" to spam texts may just notify the senders that
| your email account is still active and being read by a human.
| If it's not from a legit organization which will actually
| respect your "stop/unsubscribe," just delete the message and
| don't reply at all.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Yeah I'm thinking about legitimate businesses that I shop
| at that keep sending me coupons I don't want.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Also, sending such a reply may turn out to be a chargeable
| message, not included in your standard plan.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| Well. The UK is not immune to spam calls. Here is a YouTube
| video of hacker going after a call centre that was targeting
| the UK. They were making millions of dollars per year.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyEoOfSECp0
|
| Indian knows english. It's hard to target non-english speakers.
| wozniacki wrote:
| Same reason the U.S. allows all other sorts of privacy invasion
| like the White-Pages-like search sites that will gladly share (
| for free ) your past 11 something U.S. mailing addresses you've
| resided at, the names, ages & addresses of your family members
| & a whole host of other information ( you may have to pay for
| this bit ). All you need is someone's First & Last name. Even
| the U.S. state is not really needed.
|
| The reason being someone is reaping massive benefits from
| whatever loophole allows for this kind of data collection & is
| shoring up initiatives so that loophole isn't plugged.
|
| Now try the same search with a U.K. resident or E.U. resident
| you know of. I'd say you will have a markedly tougher time
| gaining access to similar information, with just a few clicks &
| without ever pulling out your credit card. I have no clue if
| U.K. is similarly compromised off late but a few years ago (
| prior to Brexit ) it was not the case.
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| Lucky you. I usually get one or two spam calls a day in Europe
| (France/Germany) but they are marked as spam.
|
| Bless the people keeping that red list up to date.
|
| This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info
| (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when
| receiving text or calls.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| > This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info
| (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when
| receiving text or calls.
|
| We do have that, but it probably depends on the carrier and
| the type of phone you have. On my iPhone with Verizon,
| there's a setting to "Silence Junk Callers", in which "calls
| identified by Verizon as potential spam or fraud will be
| silenced, automatically sent to voicemail, and displayed on
| the Recents list."
|
| It's not perfect, though, and I still get a ton of spam
| calls. As a rule I almost never answer the phone if I don't
| recognize the number.
| supertrope wrote:
| Spam filtering for phone calls is in its infancy. Only 20% of
| calls are signed https://transnexus.com/blog/2022/shaken-
| statistics-november/. Some robocalls are signed. Many
| legitimate calls are blocked. I ignore all unknown callers.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| we do have that info (perhaps presentation of such depends on
| phone software of course).
|
| almost all my inbound calls are spam, in the united states.
| when i've listened to voicemails left, they even have native
| north american accented people reading the prerecorded
| scripts, so there's deep roots to the depravity that cross
| country borders.
| ghaff wrote:
| >if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely
| spam) automatically pop up
|
| Sometimes but not consistently.
|
| Though honestly in the US I get maybe one SPAM call or text a
| week these days.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info
| (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when
| receiving text or calls.
|
| Yes, of course we do. Verizon and T-Mobile, at the very
| least, mark calls as "likely spam" reliably. Can't speak for
| any carriers as I've not been a customer of theirs for some
| time.
| karmelapple wrote:
| I wouldn't say "of course" for a few reasons:
|
| 1. It was introduced only within the last couple of years,
| even though spam calls have been happening for much longer
| than that 2. A bunch of calls escape the "spam likely"
| designation even though I'm on one of the major carriers
|
| So I'd say although we have it, it's not nearly as reliable
| as I'd expect it to be.
| sdfds1231231 wrote:
| These scammers have become bolder. Recently the targets have been
| elderly indians as well.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| At this point I don't consider email, text, or phone calls to be
| a legitimate way to contact me.
|
| If you want to contact me, message me on signal.
|
| It's sad, but marketers and scammers have effectively ruined the
| idea of people reaching out to me on the phone. It's sad, but it
| is what it is.
| pico303 wrote:
| To everyone suggesting to silence unknown callers, most of these
| scams come through email or text messages, and the victim is
| tricked into calling the scammer.
|
| Best defense: don't ever call a phone number you receive in a
| text or email message. Delete the message and look up your
| bank's, Amazon's, or PayPal's phone number yourself through the
| company's official web site.
|
| Also, don't get scared by messages about your finances...stay
| calm. The scammers count on you getting freaked out and doing
| something stupid.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| It is too easy to fake the originating number. The actual line
| number where the phone call comes from is probably in the
| protocol already. A lot could be solved if the phones started to
| display that as well. Even better, allow the users to block on
| both official and actual numbers. Could probably be done without
| involving the telcos, only a change in the handset software.
| marze wrote:
| Rather than "caused by illegal Indian call centres in 2022",
| wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Indian industrial-scale
| criminal scam operations"?
| geodel wrote:
| You can call _Indian industrial-scale criminal scam operations
| strategic centers deployed against US_ , if that helps victims
| get back their money and justice.
| seaourfreed wrote:
| [flagged]
| reaperducer wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Would you please follow the site guidelines? They
| explicitly ask you not post this sort of dross, which only
| makes things worse.
|
| Indeed you managed to break several of them with this one
| post. Not cool.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| willhinsa wrote:
| AND
|
| de facto sanctioned by India and USA by not enforcing the law
| and busting the scammers
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Operating in collusion with American carriers who don't try to
| identify and block these operations because they get paid on a
| per-call basis?
| kodah wrote:
| Is that the case?
|
| When I worked in telefony abuse, like this, was pretty hard
| to track because of all the middlemen involved. They'd have
| phone banks with multiple phone numbers that they'd lease
| from providers in India who worked with them to rotate
| through outbound numbers. India doesn't allow Americans
| telefony companies, much less voip (in order to provide these
| telefony companies business), so looking at India from a
| telefony perspective is much like looking at several black
| boxes.
|
| Tldr; because of India's policies the country of India has to
| do something about it. Much like Chinese knockoffs and IP
| theft.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| We handled this in the days of email spam by blacklisting
| providers that refused to police their customers.
| saghm wrote:
| What would happen if the American companies just started
| playing hardball? For example, what if they required that
| contracts with foreign telephone companies had a fee based
| on scams detected as coming through and just refused to
| work with any company that wouldn't agree to those terms? I
| have no idea if that exact idea would make sense or even be
| possible to implement, but my thinking is that in many
| cases the American companies might be able to afford to
| lose the business more than their international partners,
| so playing a game of chicken might be worthwhile. In other
| words, just because American telecoms might not be able to
| do anything from a technical perspective doesn't mean that
| they don't have social or business pressure they could
| apply if they actually wanted to solve the problem.
| Ultimately, it seems like the American companies haven't
| done anything because they don't really have any business
| incentive to; as long as they aren't held culpable legally
| and don't lose sales due to the PR hit, trying to use their
| influence to solve this is purely a risk from a financial
| perspective.
|
| I don't at all subscribe to the Friedman perspective that
| businesses are ethically obligated to maximize profits at
| the expense of literally everything else, but I do think
| that it's a reasonable description of the way businesses
| trend toward acting; an entity structurally designed for
| making profits will inevitably end up acting in a way that
| only considers that measure unless the incentives are
| changed, which is precisely why we _do_ need to regulate
| things to curtail business behavior that's a net bad for
| society as a whole by making it unprofitable, whether
| that's through direct fines or making business liable
| either civilly or criminally for their actions.
| kodah wrote:
| The form of hardball (that I'm aware of) would be
| blacklisting providers, which means good faith people get
| blocked along with bad faith people. That'd limit a lot
| of people from the US communicating back to India. It
| would be possible to block inbound but not outbound calls
| though, I believe.
| thorncorona wrote:
| In that case the good faith people can move to a
| different provider and the problem will self segregate
| out.
|
| Pretty much everyone who communicates overseas use apps
| now because they're free.
| supertrope wrote:
| The FCC has ordered American phone companies to drop
| traffic from known spam conduit phone companies.
| https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-global-uc-
| robocall-m... Hopefully this will tighten the noose and
| make robocall traffic radioactive.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I suppose it's not that easy. They can use international VOIP
| providers to route their calls, maybe even run their own,
| rotating the numbers they use and disguising the actual
| origin. If that wouldn't work you could probably hire people
| in other countries to put some agent software on something
| like a smart phone and use these.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It is that easy. Regardless of what convoluted setup
| they're using, at some point those calls need to get to the
| US-based carrier. That is where they can be blocked. The
| carrier can simply say "we'll stop peering with you if more
| than 10% of your calls are spam" and the upstream carriers
| will have to clean up their act (better screen their
| customers or implement similar terms) or be cut off from
| being able to reach the US.
|
| The problem is that the US carrier gets paid for
| terminating the call, regardless of whether it's spam or
| not. Why would they kill the golden goose?
| neerajsi wrote:
| The problem is bad enough that a us customer might pay
| extra to not receive those calls. So maybe the phone
| company can profit off of a service to solve the problem.
| grammers wrote:
| I once had an issue with Microsoft at work and had to get MS
| support to help me. They literally called me on the landline and
| asked for remote control of my computer. It was totally legit.
|
| Still I felt uncomfortable and asked for a Teams session with
| screensharing instead (and not remote access), but this 'was not
| possible'.
|
| So, how are people to distinguish between 'fake' calls and real
| ones if companies still use such shitty techniques?
| tester457 wrote:
| Maybe their email domains, I don't think scammers can get a
| hold of domains like "microsoftsupport.com"
| grammers wrote:
| They couldn't get it to work on Linux anyway. So I just
| stopped and never got the issue resolved...
| jfk13 wrote:
| Why not?
|
| OK, looks like "microsoftsupport.com" is taken, but GoDaddy
| is happy to offer me alternatives like microsoftsupport.app,
| microsoftsupport.site, microsoftsupport.tv, or
| microsoftsupport.uk that should work equally well for scam
| purposes. Or microsoftpcsupport.com is available, if a ".com"
| is particularly desirable.
| pca wrote:
| Doesn't Microsoft use a thousand different domains, most of
| which look sketchy? What if you receive an email from
| microsofts-support@live.com? Could you immediately tell that
| it is not legitimate compared to, e.g.
| contact@microsoftsupport.com?
| cdolan wrote:
| My favorite:
|
| aka.ms
|
| Or "cudaserv.com", which is auto enabled link scanning for
| Office365
| cute_boi wrote:
| These days whenever I hear Indian voice, I just reject call. They
| way they target grandparents is surreal. One day they told my my
| friends parents that their children is in accident and they have
| to pay in gift cards. It is so distressing to elderly people.
|
| US must take strict actions and call out India publicly. Elderly
| people are weak, education isn't going to solve the scam problem.
| Scammers must be punished harsly. They erode the trust in system.
|
| Also, Indian government is not doing anything. In many places
| like Kolkata, scammers can get away easily by bribing police. Our
| phone are being redirected to India, and they can abuse our phone
| number. I wish, the US government passes strict rules and
| regulations to keep these scammers in check.
| mike_hock wrote:
| > education isn't going to solve the scam problem
|
| If someone is being told that yadda yadda (story doesn't
| matter) and they have to pay in _gift cards,_ and they
| seriously believe that, then surely education seems to be the
| right fix.
|
| Rule no. 1: Gift cards = scam.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Telco's could put a stop to this if they really wanted to.
| Start with disabling number spoofing for international calls,
| if the number presented isn't in the country of origin then
| reject the connection request. Another choke point is the gift
| card system.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's bonkers to me that gift cards are so readily available
| to enable these scams. There's no way the gift card providers
| (Target, etc.) don't know about this, but they go out of
| their way to make it as easy as possible and make sure there
| is zero support available for scams.
|
| It's so infuriating. I know people who have lost hundreds of
| dollars to people impersonating US Social Security and
| immigration officers. The gift card providers do not care.
| The impersonated government agencies do not care. The local
| police do not care. The phone companies do not care. There is
| total and utter impunity for everyone perpetrating and
| enabling these scams.
| ronsor wrote:
| Every store I've been in within the past couple of years
| has had warnings posted _everywhere_ not to buy gift cards
| and read the codes to unknown people over the phone.
|
| I'm not sure if there's an alternative, since I'd seriously
| rather not ID be required to buy or use a gift card.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Consider that many victims might be new to the language,
| new to the country, and know very little about the
| culture except that they absolutely must immediately and
| carefully comply with all instructions from US
| immigration regardless of how arcane and bizarre.
|
| And as far as making gift cards safer, shouldn't that be
| the responsibility of the gift card providers, not to
| mention regulators tasked with consumer safety? Why is it
| that the scammers seem to ask for gift cards rather than,
| say, banking details? (I'm sure there's also some banking
| scams, but I have a feeling there's non-zero recourse for
| victims in those cases.)
|
| If it truly is somehow impossible to make gift cards safe
| to use, then I'm convinced society could survive without
| them. But I doubt it's impossible. I suspect gift
| providers deliberately go out of their way to make sure
| victims have no recourse.
| shwoopdiwoop wrote:
| Gift cards are hugely profitable for companies so I can see
| why they'd be happy to turn a blind eye.
| code_runner wrote:
| Edit: I was thinking of a totally different gift card scam.
| Whoops
|
| Gift cards should require some amount of destruction in order
| to get to the actual barcode... something to make tampering
| obvious.
|
| The same way clothes have a little ink exploder the clerk
| removes... just a quick easy step that is destructive to the
| packaging... but still presentable when you give it to
| someone
| lukevp wrote:
| Gift cards don't have a value until you purchase them, the
| package is meaningless. The barcode is scanned and the
| value is added when the transaction is completed.
| valine wrote:
| The scams work by getting the victim to send the codes to
| the scammer. They don't care about the physical cards.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Wait, how would this stop phone scams?
| Fnoord wrote:
| Nothing can _stop_ that. The goal is lowering the victims
| / profit. How to do that, that's the question. It comes
| to no surprise to me poor countries (with bribed police
| force) try to scam rich ones.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| How would this affect the profits?
| Cerium wrote:
| They already do? Usually I see gift cards packaged in a
| sealed paper envelope that and the redemption code itself
| is covered up with tamper evident paint.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Yes and uhh.
|
| At some point, the way to fight crime is to fight crime. It's
| not that hard to find and prosecute most call centre
| scammers.
|
| A lot of these scammers would not do it if there was risk.
| They're not often hardened criminals.
| loopdoend wrote:
| Indeed, with the gift card system... how does $10 billion get
| laundered through gift cards like that?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Is it possible to simply pass them around like currency?
| Eventually the holders will want to buy something from
| Amazon.
|
| Or, you invent a shop that also trades on Amazon and "buy"
| the stuff from yourself. That might explain some odd shops
| that you see online.
| pnw wrote:
| The Feds already started on this with STIR/SHAKEN protocol
| which has been mandated by the FCC for most carriers in
| recent years.
|
| However, just like email spam, stopping spoofed calls is
| harder in practice than in theory.
| negamax wrote:
| Can't they implement DKIM, SPF etc. like system? Not aware
| of technical reality of Telcos but international number
| spoofing should be easily solvable as billing is done
| through the origin location
| supertrope wrote:
| It's still in the early days of even deploying signing.
| Telcos are dragging their feet asking for exemptions and
| delays. Once virtually all calls are signed, then there
| has to be agreement on when to block unsigned traffic,
| and finally whack a mole with banning spammers and KYC to
| keep them banned.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It can be very easy, depending on your comfort with
| breaking existing systems. Disable all inbound
| international calling and you no longer have a problem.
| That would remove 99% of spam and would have zero negative
| impact to 99% of individuals who receive calls.
|
| Of course, businesses with a lot of money care about use
| cases in that last 1%.
| Lex-2008 wrote:
| Can't you disable international calls only for
| individuals who don't need them?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| A carrier could probably do that, individuals could not.
| The challenge is that caller ID is generally kinda like
| your email display name: It doesn't mean anything. The
| important part, which STIR/SHAKEN is adding verification
| requirements to, is what telcos are actually involved in
| the exchange.
|
| I'd love a setting I could flip to disable inbound voice
| calls from any carrier that isn't like... Verizon, AT&T,
| T-Mobile, and Comcast.
| Cheezewheel wrote:
| >However, just like email spam, stopping spoofed calls is
| harder in practice than in theory.
|
| Is it really? Couldn't the carriers simply require a
| certificate to allow you to spoof a phone number?
| wbl wrote:
| The most legacy of systems. They didn't even get rid of
| human operators until 1970 on Catalina island.
| https://youtu.be/jitW_yLwihI
|
| SS7 doesn't have a clean way to do this hence needing to
| make SHAKEN/STIR, but I don't think anyone did the
| signalling work for POTS.
| pnw wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly what STIR/SHAKEN does - in theory. In
| practice, like most complex systems, mandating a change
| like this requires software and hardware upgrades and
| compatibility testing, all of which takes time. The FCC
| tracks >10k telcos and providers. Last time I checked,
| only a quarter of the companies had fully implemented
| STIR/SHAKEN since the deadline and the FCC has recently
| started enforcement action on telcos that have ignored
| it. There is some evidence it has reduced spoofed calls,
| but just like email, the scammers have also moved to
| adapt their techniques.
|
| https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-companies-
| robocall-d...
| wil421 wrote:
| There's a common scam on FaceBook Marketplace for sellers.
| They contact you and are interested in buying what you have.
| Once they have your phone number they send a google
| verification code and ask you to send it back to verify each
| other.
|
| The goal is to setup a US google voice number to abuse later.
| cdolan wrote:
| My wife gets a million hits on stupid items on FBMktPl.
|
| This makes so much sense. Thanks!
| briffle wrote:
| I thought this was the whole point of STIR/SHAKEN protocol
| the FCC requires, but maybe there are still some providers
| that are exempted?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
| mderazon wrote:
| Is it also for SMS ? It's 99% spam and 1% 2FA codes to log
| in to stupid banks.
|
| No way to selectively block SMS on phones (at least
| natively). Only reason I don't disable it completely is due
| to the 1 percent
| pnw wrote:
| Only about a quarter of the 10k telcos covered by the FCC
| have adopted STIR/SHAKEN in the year since the deadline.
|
| The FCC has started enforcement actions, in October they
| announced they are cutting off seven telcos who failed to
| comply. Only ~7000 more to go!
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| No they can't. The scammers will just hire a random person
| from indeed/monster/whatever, ship them a SIM box and tell
| them to fill it with prepaids.
| mclightning wrote:
| no, not with that mindset. security is about creating
| obstacles. obstacles create friction and traces, even when
| they fail.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| Using SIM boxes is already standard practice, sketchy
| VOIP providers and SMS spammers have been doing for years
| because it is cheaper to do this than to pay for
| legitimate routing.
|
| Just put something along the lines of "sim box grey
| route" into Google and you'll find loads of relevant
| industry materials.
|
| Besides, you're drastically moving the goalposts here. We
| went from "could put a stop to this" to minor obstacles.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You tackle these things one-obstacle-at-the-time. Telco's
| are borderline complicit in this today, they don't have to
| be. Note that in some countries these scams are far more
| prevalent than in others, they'll go for the low hanging
| fruit first just like any other business. Make it harder
| and definitely there will be a response and then you aim to
| tackle that one. Shipping a SIM box would already be much
| more work than just changing a number in a database.
| Require that a phone number is used in the country of
| origin before you allow it to roam is another step in that
| process and so on. Rome wasn't built in a day and I'm sure
| that getting rid of this problem is going to be a series of
| steps.
|
| But as long as telcos willingly cooperate and allow remote
| call centers to basically pick any number in the locality
| of the recipient _even though that number is not currently
| roaming in India_ they are making things much worse.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| > Note that in some countries these scams are far more
| prevalent than in others, they'll go for the low hanging
| fruit first just like any other business
|
| The reason for this is language barriers, it's not some
| countries doing things better than others.
|
| > Shipping a SIM box would already be much more work than
| just changing a number in a database
|
| They don't even actually need to ship one, there are
| thousands of them operational already. This is a
| _massive_ industry.
|
| Even if you cracked down hard on SIM boxes, the scammers
| will just purchase routing from botnets. This won't
| really impact their costs, and will be essentially
| impossible to take any meaningful action against.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, but that would at least put them at the same level
| as burner phones with a physical presence required in the
| target country (or close to it).
|
| Anyway, since you are willing to shoot down each and
| every suggestion in this thread short of rolling over and
| accepting the damage how would you tackle it?
| jeltz wrote:
| Most of these scammers already have physical presence in
| the US. I feel the solution is probably to be found in
| more policing and prosecution than in creating tiny
| obstacles.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| Can you give a single example of similar fraud being
| successfully tackled? Not just the scammers being caught,
| but the entire scam being rendered unprofitable.
|
| European authorities haven't managed to do anything about
| the car selling scams Romanians have been running for
| decades now. Nobody has managed to do anything about the
| Nigerian prince scams. BEC with truly shitty phishing
| pages keeps on growing and growing.
|
| The best bet would be for US authorities to force India
| to crack down on these activities and prevent these scams
| from operating at an industrial scale.
|
| The actions you propose would work well to address lower
| return activities, such as marketing robocalls. They can
| not work to address high-return scams.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Can you give a single example of similar fraud being
| successfully tackled?
|
| Plenty of such cases here locally. Your point about the
| language barrier is on the money though, I never really
| gave that much thought but the number of Dutch speakers
| in India is most likely so low and the market so small
| that it isn't worth a massive campaign to them.
| Especially not if there are millions of gullible people
| in markets that are more accessible to them.
|
| As for forcing Indian authorities: I've seen up close how
| corrupt things are there and I have very little hope that
| that would be a viable avenue to resolution of this
| problem.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| > Plenty of such cases here locally.
|
| I'd be super curious to hear about any local success
| stories.
|
| >As for forcing Indian authorities: I've seen up close
| how corrupt things are there and I have very little hope
| that that would be a viable avenue to resolution of this
| problem.
|
| Then you're left with education. These scams are very
| profitable and can easily afford resistance from telcos
| and banks.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| If we can make it harder to run a scam call business by
| changing things on our end, and these changes do not
| impede non-fraudulent use, why not go for it?
|
| I don't see why you're pushing so hard against this line
| of reasoning, I guess. You're making it sound like a
| hopeless endeavor to even try, in a "don't lock your
| doors because thieves will just use lock picks" kind of
| way.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| > If we can make it harder to run a scam call business by
| changing things on our end
|
| How much harder? If your changes increase the telephony
| costs of a scam call centre from 0.001% of revenue to
| 0.002%, you have not actually made their operations
| harder.
|
| > and these changes do not impede non-fraudulent use, why
| not go for it?
|
| Because these changes would not be free.
| jmartrican wrote:
| Maybe some lawsuits are in order. There might be a case
| to be made that theft is occurring on these telco
| networks, and they should be held liable.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Couldn't this be fixed by restricting international roaming
| of US SIMs into countries with high rates of call scams?
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| No, the SIM boxes live in the US.
| jeltz wrote:
| Nothing says that they cannot put the SIM box in e.g. the
| US or Canada. It does not have to be in India.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yeah, I do not see how stopping the spoofing (which I am
| all for doing) would be anything but a minor inconvenience
| for them.
| toast0 wrote:
| Stopping the spoofing makes it easier to provide
| actionable reports.
|
| Right now, an actionable report really needs a traced
| call, which is hard to actually make.
|
| Certainly, it doesn't get you right to a chargable
| person, but it gets you a lot more than today.
| imglorp wrote:
| I think the subtext is that given valid caller IDs, then
| block lists can be made. The US FTC might manage them
| like it does the do-not-call lists, or the perhaps the US
| Attorney's office, after some criminal complaints.
|
| Ideally, the telco would implement these block lists, but
| also ideally, they could be traded around like web ad
| block lists for individuals to load on their phones.
|
| I think we all know scam calls are a serious source of
| revenue for carriers, so they will need to be led to this
| conclusion by force.
|
| None of that happy future would come without true caller
| id, thus the resistence from carriers to fixing spoofing.
| jeltz wrote:
| > I think we all know scam calls are a serious source of
| revenue for carriers, so they will need to be led to this
| conclusion by force.
|
| Why would they be a major revenue source? The carriers
| make their money from normal users, not dodgy call
| centers.
| supertrope wrote:
| Phone companies make money by the minute.
| imglorp wrote:
| Logically, there must be enough benefit for them carrying
| spoofed robocalls to risk regulatory attention AND
| driving away all their voice revenue. Many people have
| stopped answering their phones altogether since voice
| calls became unusable.
| supertrope wrote:
| Voice revenue has been replaced by cellphone bills which
| are mostly broadband.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Enough minor inconveniences and the barrier to entry will
| go up, this will favor the larger players but those you
| can then go after with other means. It's never going to
| be a one-stop solution.
|
| Ideally there would be a warning that a call does not
| originate locally, routing the call through a local
| representative would generate yet another signal that you
| might be able to close off, including the possibility to
| declare the possession or hosting of certain gear
| illegal. You'd have to maybe do some pattern matching to
| spot problematic numbers and/or have a place to report
| them easily.
|
| If the will was really there I'm pretty sure this problem
| could be tackled.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| Have you seen how elaborate schemes small players on
| sites like crimemarket.is engage in for their scams?
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Wow that site was trippy. It's easy to forget what the
| dark side of the web looks like
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| Yeah, and this is almost the bottom of the food chain,
| the only people below crimemarket are those too dumb to
| use internet forums.
|
| Anyone can easily buy European bank accounts opened with
| fake IDs, or money laundering services where you're
| provided an IBAN and receive a % of the money sent there
| to your cryptocurrency wallet.
|
| Want a fake passport good enough to travel with? No
| problem, will just run you a 1000 euros.
| jeltz wrote:
| > If the will was really there I'm pretty sure this
| problem could be tackled.
|
| Probably, but not with any of your proposed methods. I
| have talked with some SMS spammers and none of what you
| proposed would affect them. And for SMS spammers these
| inconveniences are a much bigger part of the cost of
| doing operations than for a company which needs to have
| employees in a call center. They have to spend a lot of
| money on buying new SIM cards as old ones get blocked.
| jacquesm wrote:
| SMS spammers could be tackled with a couple of regexps if
| the will was there. The fact that these scams still work
| is a sign to me that there simply is no will to tackle
| any of this at the telco level. They know _exactly_ what
| is going on.
| supertrope wrote:
| There is already keyword filtering. Try using the word
| "election" in SMS at a certain time of year. A certain US
| political party complained about this. E2EE is not
| compatible with content based filtering.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| Lots of telcos are doing exactly this, doesn't really
| work very well. The spammers just switch to more generic
| messages you can't realistically filter out.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| There's no reason consumer SIMs should be able to call more
| than N distinct numbers in any 24h period. You can
| implement reasonable rate limits to prevent abuse.
|
| However, even if we assume that SIM boxes are a magic
| solution to carrier interventions, that still raises the
| cost from the current status-quo. Implement enough of these
| barriers and the entire scam operation becomes unprofitable
| and no longer worthwhile.
| bbbbb5 wrote:
| And what do you propose would be such a reasonable rate
| limit?
|
| >However, even if we assume that SIM boxes are a magic
| solution to carrier interventions, that still raises the
| cost from the current status-quo. Implement enough of
| these barriers and the entire scam operation becomes
| unprofitable and no longer worthwhile.
|
| Why do you assume that the call routing is a meaningful
| cost to these operations? For all we know they spend less
| than 0.01% of their revenue on call routing.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > There's no reason consumer SIMs should be able to call
| more than N distinct numbers in any 24h period.
|
| Oh jesus please no, whats next?
|
| Ther is no reason a consumer oven should cook more than 5
| meals a day. There is no reason a consumer toasteer
| should toast mpre than 10 times a day.
|
| The bread you make tourself is unauthorised in a toaster
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The difference between this and cooking/toasting bread is
| that your bread-making activities have no way to
| negatively affect someone else - we don't have an
| epidemic of spammers paying people to bake "underground
| bread" in their homes.
|
| Of course, an override should be provided - the
| restriction should be relaxed over time once the account
| is established for a long time without any complaints.
| vctrnk wrote:
| > Ther is no reason a consumer oven should cook more than
| 5 meals a day. There is no reason a consumer toasteer
| should toast mpre than 10 times a day.
|
| Consumer [?] business/commercial. A home oven (or
| toaster, fryer etc) isn't made for such use, a commercial
| one is. You should really spend the monies in commercial
| gear if you're gonna feed such hordes of people.
|
| Similar thing with SIM cards. Why would a normal person
| be making 100+ calls a day on a simple, personal line?
| That's clearly commercial use and as such, it oughta be
| regulated somehow.
| [deleted]
| sfifs wrote:
| The basic problem is that in highly un-regulated & legalistic
| economy & polity like the United States, failures such as these
| are not easily corrected especially where everyone except the
| weak make money. Everyone who could stop this is making money,
| the telco operators, amazon, the banks and everyone is weighing
| the cost of taking any legal or other action and is maximizing
| their own gain... nobody is really looking to is this socially
| good.
|
| Contrast this with how the Singapore government in a similarly
| highly capitalist economy dealt with this - basically telling
| banks - "you'd better make good the consumers & deal with your
| holes or else" https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/mas-
| will-consider-...
|
| In many ways in domain after domain, US nowadays seems to act
| as the "economic proving ground of the world" where lax
| regulation allows a million ideas to flourish. Then folks in
| other parts of the world seem to take the best winning ideas,
| figure out how to make it work in a socially & governmentally
| acceptable way in other parts of the world and out-compete the
| US originators (eg. how Uber, Lyft, Amazon, US based social
| media firms have effectively been pushed out of dominance in
| Asia)
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Consideration needs to be made when thinking that a policy
| which works in Singapore, one of the smallest countries in
| the world by area and one with a strong tradition of rather
| strict governance in the modern era, can be applied to vastly
| larger ones with some pretense of respect of constitutional
| civil rights and a history of distrust of strong government.
| wallfacer120 wrote:
| [dead]
| joegahona wrote:
| I had to instruct my elderly father to do the same -- any kind
| of accent and he hangs up. He got scammed by one of these
| people in 2018 or so -- he gave the person his debit card
| number over the phone to remove malware on his computer while I
| was out on a super-long run. Luckily he couldn't remember his
| PIN, and his bank was great at blocking the charge. There's a
| special place in hell for these animals who prey on old people.
| danenania wrote:
| These days I'd recommend just not answering any unrecognized
| number. If they're waiting for a call for some specific
| reason, they can look at voicemail transcripts to see if it's
| the call they were expecting and call back. Otherwise it's
| best to ignore any incoming calls. Anything truly important
| won't use a phone call as the only contact method.
| silisili wrote:
| As bad as it is to say, I mostly do the same.
|
| You'd think India would be on top of this and come down hard.
| If folks just start associating Indian accents as 'scammers',
| businesses abroad that currently rely on outsourcing support
| and other services are going to eventually have to pull out.
| You can't run effective customer support if the customer
| assumes you're a bad actor just because of your voice and hangs
| up.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I'm not sure businesses care. Everyone I know associates
| Indian accent with either scam or useless call center rep who
| can't actually see the account or help in any way. India is
| often given the informational customer service, and only
| Americans can make account changes. Or someone not in India
| at any rate.
| albedoa wrote:
| And it's not just the accent. The popular guidance on
| /r/scams is that if an email uses the word "kindly" where a
| native English speaker would say "please", it is vastly more
| likely than not that it is a scam.
|
| Unfortunately, that use of that word is popular among
| Indians, but any half-measure guidance leaves room for an
| already susceptible mark to convince themselves that maybe
| this email is not a scam.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > You'd think India would be on top of this and come down
| hard.
|
| They "try", but the scammers just pay off the cops
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Of course that won't really help.
|
| The vast majority of scams are "romance" scams.
|
| These are people who don't have accents but good job
| prejudicing your father against a whole group of people while
| not actually protecting him from scams.
| silisili wrote:
| It's right in the article, at the bottom, that romance
| scams only account for 1/10th of the total money taken in
| 2022.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > The vast majority of scams are "romance" scams.
|
| do you have any sort of citation for that?
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > They way they target grandparents is surreal
|
| My grandmother got hit with one of these, she has a weak heart
| and was in severe mental distress all day because she couldn't
| get ahold of me to confirm what the scammers were telling her.
|
| I try not to judge others, but what monster can do this for a
| living?
| frontman1988 wrote:
| https://www.sanas.ai/
|
| Be warned. AI accent changers will eliminate that line of
| defense as well.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Thankfully that's still easy enough to spot - it sounds like
| a better version of those early speech synthesizers we played
| around with as kids in the nineties - but I can see the
| elderly having trouble distinguishing it from a real voice.
| elephanlemon wrote:
| I'm worried what will happen when deepfaked voices improve to
| the point that you can get a realistic impression with only a
| very small training set. Imagine receiving a phone call in
| the voice of a family member telling you that they're in
| serious trouble.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| I once got a spear phishing call from a scammer claiming to
| be the CEO of the company I work for. Even though I barely
| know the CEO, the phrases he was using was obviously wrong.
|
| I'd imagine that's even more obvious for any family member.
| If a family member calls from any number that's not their
| number, my first question will be an honest "How the heck
| did you remember my phone number?"
| api wrote:
| Pretty soon it'll eliminate call centers. One person will be
| able to use AI to mass-robocall millions of people.
| olivermarks wrote:
| What a dystopian, terrifying prospect.
|
| On a personal level I keep a referee's whistle handy in
| case I'm talking to a scammer live. They are usually
| wearing headsets and any damage I can do to their hearing
| with that may save an old persons savings in the following
| few minutes. Best technique is to speak softly so they turn
| their volume up then let rip on the whistle
| tester457 wrote:
| It gets more terrifying. Soon whistles will be useless
| because scammer AI bots with synthesized speech won't be
| affected.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| The answer? A scam call answering AI bot which engages with
| the scammer (or the scammer AI bot) and wastes as much of
| their time and international call fees as possible without
| giving them a valid bank account or gift card number,
| Kitboga[1]-style. As soon as you detect the call is coming
| from a scammer, you push a button and your phone takes it
| over from there.
|
| Eventually we'll just have a network of AI scambots calling
| up AI scambaiters and having completely useless
| conversations in synthesized English with each other for
| hours upon hours and nobody will remember why.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/@KitbogaShow
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| You're a lot more patient than me. I've stopped answering calls
| from unknown numbers. I get 3-4 calls per day, which luckily I
| can auto-ignore on iOS.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I had to get a second phone with a new phone number that I
| only give out to close friends and family.
| JTbane wrote:
| Yeah, no, this works great until you get an actually
| important call from a previously unknown number (hospital,
| job interview, etc.)
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| only problem i have is with deliver or restaurant
| reservations
|
| so i unpause the silence during that time
|
| the hospital is def an issue, i don't have a great solution
| there especially for unplanned emergencies.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| They can leave a message or text. I have been doing this
| for years as this is the only way to be able to use a phone
| line without getting crazy. If your number is not in my
| phonebook you go to my voicemail.
| supertrope wrote:
| That is a cost I will accept. I used to get about 3
| robocalls per day, or 1000 robocalls for every legitimate
| unknown caller. There is a fundamental tradeoff between
| optimizing for minimizing false positives or false
| negatives.
| sneak wrote:
| Anyone who calls me versus emailing/texting is not getting
| to me, full stop.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Make sure your voicemail provides a verbal escalation path
| for a loved one who needs to reach you from an unknown number
| (first responder, jail, hospital, etc).
| [deleted]
| nigerianbrince wrote:
| Just install trucaller on their phone.
| leftcenterright wrote:
| Your intention might very well be good but this is very bad
| advice, please do not install Truecaller! This app is a
| privacy nightmare. From accessing your phonebook/contact info
| to location, it has been known to be responsible for leaking
| information of journalists and for storing user data without
| consent.
|
| > While TrueCaller may have laudable intentions, the privacy
| implications for people who end up in their database raise
| concerns. When a number is tagged, the person who is tagged
| ends up having their name and phone number stored on the
| TrueCaller database, despite not having consented - or even
| being aware - that their data was collected.
|
| - https://privacyinternational.org/node/2997
|
| Some of the features require excessive permissions.
|
| - https://support.truecaller.com/support/solutions/articles/8
| 1...
|
| - https://globalvoices.org/2022/10/14/the-true-colours-of-
| true...
| omginternets wrote:
| My experience with Trucaller is that it does just about
| nothing. I suspect that by the time a number has been marked
| as spam, the offender has already switched to a new number. I
| wouldn't be surprised to learn that scammers were monitoring
| Trucaller and it's ilk to determine when to change numbers.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Maybe they should have sent an FBI liaison earlier. Or maybe
| they should consider appointing an ambassador to India, 2 years
| into the new administration.
| iamshs wrote:
| Canadian public broadcaster, CBC, reported this as "financial
| terrorism" back in 2019. Now it seems the references have been
| scrubbed out. $10B drained from old and financial vulnerable is
| absolutely ridiculous and should be called financial terrorism.
| jws wrote:
| Terrorism requires a political goal. Simply wanting more money
| and stealing it isn't a political goal.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Maybe there should be some educational program about these. Or
| license to have a phone and bank account...
| nikanj wrote:
| Did the economy benefit over $10B from allowing voip calls to
| spoof numbers? I feel like dropping that ability would be a net
| win - would be much harder to spoof the elderly with a scam
| coming from a clearly foreign number
| 1SFOD-D wrote:
| [flagged]
| baby wrote:
| I don't respond to phone calls anymore. I receive spam calls and
| texts every day. At this point I'm thinking about just blocking
| everything, the problem is that I still need to use this for:
|
| - 2FA
|
| - restaurants waitlist
|
| That's it. I just scrolled through a bunch of texts and calls and
| anything meaningful nowadays seem to come from whatsapp
| [deleted]
| Qtips87 wrote:
| There are other scams Indians run too. And I am sure it is not
| what you think.
| [deleted]
| mderazon wrote:
| Ironically, India have solved the problem domestically via
| regulation
|
| https://www.ledgerinsights.com/how-it-works-india-anti-spam-...
| bjourne wrote:
| I've also had a run-in with "the Indian tech support". Weird
| thing is that when the guy on the other end realized I was
| running Linux and just messing with him, he became incredibly
| rude and cursed at me. Told me to "put fingers up my butt" and
| that I was a horrible person for wasting his time... Surreal
| almost.
| sys32768 wrote:
| I always wait on the line until I get an actual person and then I
| give them a satisfyingly long raspberry.
|
| I think it would be more effective if I learned a Hindi curse.
| temp20221227 wrote:
| I have to preface this with saying that most Indians are decent
| people, and do not work at call centers scamming Americans.
| Within India, they deal with this type of phone crap on a level
| beyond what we do. There are some shady loan companies there
| that require you to upload your contacts list and harass every
| one of your contacts if you miss a payment.
|
| Anyways, I'm all for insulting a call center scammer, and a
| rude comment about their mom, especially comparing them to a
| dog or something, will probably piss them off. Then if they
| overreact back, threaten to email their boss the call
| recording.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >I think it would be more effective if I learned a Hindi curse.
|
| When asked, just tell them your name is "Ben Chod". Gets em
| every time.
| snshn wrote:
| I'm sure those scammers will redeem themselves one day.
| dxbydt wrote:
| Until last year, I was completely unaware of this problem. I made
| a stupid, stupid mistake - registered a .us TLD using "Google
| Domains" - within minutes of registration, the calls started.
| Some Indian voice offering website construction, ios app, android
| app, tech support, on & on...over 100 calls in a single week!
| Used call block but they kept coming. They switch numbers and
| send 1000s of text messages - neverending spam. I wrote to Google
| support and they pointed to the fineprint - cannot enable privacy
| on .us tld ! So the phone number will remain public. Calls kept
| coming. Over 1000 calls! Finally bit the bullet and changed my
| phone number. Will never ever buy anything from google domains. I
| sure hope the FTC goes after these spammers and the telcos who
| enable this sort of behavior.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I learned this the hard way too. Not with Google domains, but
| another registrar. I was getting dozens of calls a day from
| Indian voices proposing to create a website for me. Switched
| the WHOIS data to private and that slowed it down but didn't
| stop it. This was two years ago and I'm still getting about one
| call a day. I've since learned there are caching services for
| WHOIS data that will sell you historical contact data.
| Obviously the Indian fraudsters are using these services.
|
| The days of friendly WHOIS are over. Never register a domain
| without setting the privacy flag.
| binkHN wrote:
| > cannot enable privacy on .us tld
|
| Interesting! Never knew this!
| theGnuMe wrote:
| After a hail storm comes thru, hundreds of calls from
| "roofers".
| kevmarsden wrote:
| That sounds like a nightmare, but I wouldn't let that
| experience sour your opinion of Google Domains.
|
| I actively avoid Google products, but Google Domains is an
| exception. They make limited upsell appeals, their pricing is
| straight forward, and if it's available, they include privacy
| protection with the annual cost.
|
| And they are clear about the lack of privacy protection for .us
| domains. This text appears when checking out: "Privacy
| protection is not supported for .US domains."
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's not Google's fault. This is the rule for .us domains.
| Blame the US government.
| ipqk wrote:
| But that's not a Google Domains issue, it's a .us issue. All
| registrars cannot enable privacy on .us domains.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Can we change the link to the original sources?
|
| > Romance-related frauds and 'tech support' pop ups, originating
| largely from illegal call centres and phishing gangs in India,
| have caused losses of more than USD 3 billion... in the last two
| years alone. [1]
|
| > Daud said the FBI's website for reporting internet crimes
| (ic3.gov) have registered about 8.5 lakh complaints in 2021 with
| estimated losses of $6.9 billion, and over 7.8 lakh complaints in
| the 11 months of 2022, accounting for $10.2 billion in losses.
| The biggest losses are on account of investment ($3 billion),
| business email compromise ($2.4 billion), personal data breach
| ($1.2 billion), romance ($1 billion) and tech support ($781
| million). [1]
|
| [1] "Illegal Desi Call Centres Behind 10 billion loss to
| Americans in 2022", Times of India, Dec 27, 2022:
| https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/illegal-desi-call-...
|
| [2] "Elder Fraud Report 2021", FBI Internet Crime Complaint
| Center https://www.ic3.gov/Home/EF
| https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2021_IC3ElderFrau...
| jeezzbo wrote:
| [dead]
| sdfds1231231 wrote:
| These scammers have become bolder. Recently the targets have been
| elderly Indians. My friends dad was scammed a few lakhs.
| Obviously no police complaint gonna work, they just gonna keep it
| on record. Hopefully the international outrage would push the
| authorities to do something about it.
| temp20221227 wrote:
| A lot of comments here suggest the Indian government is
| complacent in these types of operations, but I don't really
| believe that's the case.
|
| The Indian central government is a pretty small and unpowerful
| entity. Beyond securing the countries borders, and keeping the
| currency spinning, the government doesn't have the ability or
| power to do much more. They are not especially well funded (taxes
| are seen as especially unwelcome culturally) and staffed by
| tenured officials who cannot be fired and have no incentive to
| perform beyond the bare minimum. The relative unity and peace
| holding the country together is not the lousy government, but
| really more Indian culture sticking together.
|
| Police are also seen as having some level of authority in the
| country, but realistically there's only 1 police for every 1,000
| citizens (source:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/worldbusiness/03...)
| and the country is heavily heavily reliant on private security
| who are generally just villagers who are given a badge and rules
| to enforce.
|
| Outside the big cities, government control is very limited. How
| else could the crop burning choking Delhi every winter continue?
|
| So do these call centers operate with the blessing of the
| government? Probably not. Do they have to bribe police to
| operate? probably not. The government is probably unaware of
| scale of the problem, the police have their hands full taking
| care of their own people, and the American government wouldn't
| dare try a diplomatic solve as India's agreement with many
| foreign policy situations is mission critical.
|
| Maybe it'd be better if in America we could try to get support
| off of the POTS and try to better connect to official brand sites
| or apps? Or we have phone plans/email plans for the elderly that
| don't allow stranger contact?
| whydid wrote:
| The Indian government is complacent because they allow such
| extreme poverty to exist where people need to seek out scams
| like this in order to survive.
|
| Extreme inequities rationalized by an abusive caste system,
| mixed with a culture that praises creative work avoidance.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| I like that the same page shows a video of an "illegal school"
| being torn down by the government. Is this a joke?
|
| Like, what kind of dastardly evil people are constructing schools
| without permits in a country desperate trying to feed and
| education the large population?
|
| Is the municipality head just upset they didn't get an under-the-
| table payment like usual?
| chakkepolja wrote:
| Schools are a money making business like everything else.
| Illegal school means they didnt follow rules and regulations.
| temp20221227 wrote:
| Not a joke.
|
| Your concepts of building codes and property ownership are
| western. There's no such thing in India. Rather, there's a
| patchwork of policies that contradict each other and no
| consistent sense of which one has precedence. And land
| ownership is complicated by qualifications over who can sell it
| and claims from family members who maybe had a descendent there
| hundreds of years ago. And of course, various policies
| benefitting squatters. And whoever could forge the ownership
| papers nicely enough to claim it's theirs.
|
| These things are all features and not bugs. It gives pathways
| for the government to dispose of any buildings that are
| annoying it for whatever reason. They find the law on the books
| that allows them to bulldoze the school the quickest, have the
| tractors out there within hours, and complete the process
| before any lawyer can get through the patchwork of laws to stop
| it.
|
| > Like, what kind of dastardly evil people are constructing
| schools without permits in a country desperate trying to feed
| and education the large population?
|
| Don't blame whomever built the school, they were trying to
| help! Blame the ones who tore it down.
| weakfortress wrote:
| The problem is these scams are cheap to run and the risk is very
| low for the people running them. The police rarely do anything
| except a token show to arrest a few call centers full of low-
| level scammers. Rarely are the kingpins ever arrested and as such
| they just pop new centers up as often as they go down.
|
| A multi-factoral approach may be the best:
|
| 1. Sanction India to encourage the government to clean up it's
| police force and go after these scammers with prejudice. Not the
| call centers, the kingpins that run them.
|
| 2. Education. Run commercials on every TV stations, news
| stations, etc to educate people on this. Perhaps even including
| example calls. Run TV shows talking about the scammers and
| examples of them successfully bullying people into paying to
| build deep distrust of these people and allow people's pattern-
| matching brains to do the rest of the work.
|
| 3. Punishing call forwarding services for every scam call. Force
| them to implement deep KYC under threat of severe company-ending
| fines.
|
| 4. Find a way to "encourage" carriers to improve their services
| to terminate these calls before they even make it to the
| customer.
|
| I get so many telemarketing and scam calls to my phone anymore I
| have to pay $100/year for a service to stop about 80% of them.
| This is unacceptable. I'm not alone, I would guess in a survey of
| the average American their cell phone is basically useless as a
| calling device these days.
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| My grandfather stopped answering his landline telephone because
| of these scumbags. Kitboga is a youtuber who winds scammers up
| and wastes their time, and is pretty righteous
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNziOoXDBeg
| iosjunkie wrote:
| Came here to mention Kitboga. Watch a few of his videos to get
| a sense to what lengths the scammers go to defraud the elderly.
| Utterly heartless.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| There's a whole cottage industry of scam baiters. Harvey Dentt,
| Rinona Poison, Scambait Central, Lenny the robot (much less
| active of late), and quite a few others.
|
| Many of them use voice filters to sound elderly, or to change
| genders. It seems like a lot of the scammers are getting
| frustrated, constantly trying to figure out if you're Kitboga,
| etc.
|
| A vital service that is educating the public while providing
| rich entertainment.
| devinprater wrote:
| I love watching Scammer Payback and Kitboga on Youtube.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Stopping the use of gift cards sold by Target or restricting
| their use would go a long way towards stopping this. Cracking
| down on the money mules who forward the cash would help as well.
| Reporting the bank accounts the scammers use and shutting them
| down is also key.
| HollywoodZero wrote:
| It's not just India.
|
| The rise in the random texts (which end up pushing investment
| scams) also originates in off shore call centers in Southeast
| Asia.
|
| Often times they get migrant workers with promises of jobs, but
| then take their passport and force them into years of repaying
| for their relocation fees.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62792875
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