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Comment by hive_mind | Hacker News Reader

I'm Indian myself and it concerns me that so many of these scams emerge from what appears to be India (based on the Indian accents).

Does anyone know if any scammers have ever been "brought to justice" in India. Ever?

Seems like something that should be a high priority for the Indian Govt. if they want to help with India's image abroad, especially with the tech sector.

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I correspond with someone from India that is heavily into marketing this stuff (he does legitimate things as well, and is one of the most knowledgable paid Facebook advertising specialists on earth, which is how I came to know him). He has been pushing it for years and the Indian government has never come close to bothering either him or the people that actually own the services that pay him for each phone call his advertising generates.

It's not just the Indian government that is lackadaisical about this either. He is able to run ads for tech these support scams through Facebook and get ROI above 500%. Facebook eventually stops his ads, then he buys another ad account. In fact, he claims a single aged Facebook account is worth roughly $10,000 to him (aged accounts have an easier time getting ads through). He spends well into the six figures each year on these types of ads through Facebook alone. Ad platforms share some of the blame for the proliferation of these scams because they simply do not police their platforms well - the tactics he uses to get these ads through their review process are truly elementary but are good enough to foil a company full of PhD's. Clearly they aren't trying very hard.

Everything you just wrote is extremely interesting to me.

> he ... is one of the most knowledgable paid Facebook advertising specialists on earth, which is how I came to know him

> ...

> the tactics he uses to get these ads through their review process are truly elementary

I'm not a marketer or advertiser myself, but I'm always interested in learning more about these aspects of the Facebook "scene" just to better mentally map the state of things.

Sounds like a lot (if not most) of the things this person has learned are the kind that only keep working if you're quiet about them, but I'm still very curious to hear what could be shared.

Most rogue ads rely on "cloaking" which means showing an acceptable landing page to the ad network reviewers, while showing the bad landing page to everyone else. The LP's are cloaked for all visitors before they are approved and go live, since only the ad network would know the URL. The IP blocks that access these URL's during this time are recorded and permanently cloaked. Most cloakers also cloak all known data center and commercial IP blocks. Facebook sometimes checks LP's from residential and mobile IPs, and often that is how they catch rogue ads, but this isn't often done. Rogue advertisers also setup honeypot URL's, for example by sharing them on closed Facebook groups and adding any IP block that accesses them to the cloaking list.

Cloaking isn't perfect, but for those marketers with enough IP data, it is effective enough to make these kinds of campaigns enormously profitable and the occasional loss of accounts only a minor inconvenience.

Wow. That was a bit of an education. Thanks for the information.

I've never heard of this, and yet I've read a number of think-pieces that have been on the front page lambasting the ad networks for letting sketchy ads through. If this is only the trivial end of hiding from the network's policing strategies, it seems like they're a lot less culpable than I thought. Do you have links to more information on the other tactics?

You can Google "PPC cloaking" and get quite a few interesting results. There are also professional cloaking services that maintain large IP datasets. The two most popular of those are called Just Cloak It [1], and, ironically, FraudBuster [2]. Also if you're looking in general for information on this and other black/grey hat marketing techniques, Black Hat World [3] is a great place to start.

[1] http://justcloakit.com/

[2] http://fraudbuster.im

[3] http://blackhatworld.com

Come on, we're talking about Facebook? They could easily "sample" the actual ads that are displaying for users on their computers, and compare them to the ones that were approved.

Where did you learn about this kind of stuff? I'd be interested in a larger writeup.

I'd start at http://blackhatworld.com . There is alot of crap there, but also a world of valuable knowledge of this and other internet marketing techniques.

That seems quite easy to catch. Couldn't facebook just use phones that have their app installed for this? That should of course be opt-in. I can't see any privacy problems with that and if distributed (maybe weighted by app usage) across all users, the bandiwidth usage should also be completeley negligible.

They could. They don't.

(though to be fair it's completely legitimate to have landing pages that change their text based on the user's location, referrer, etc., so that wouldn't be a silver bullet).

> the tactics he uses to get these ads through their review process are truly elementary but are good enough to foil a company full of PhD's

I'm reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote, It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

I'd be weary of this person you are describing, depending how you got to know him. It reminds me a bit of certain poker coaches back in the day. You basically only have his word. I'd assume the 10k figure that accounts are worth and the 500% are vastly exaggerated. If it works so well, why is he sharing this with you? Let me guess, because he enjoys mentoring and is tired of doing the same profitable things over and over? He's probably charging a fee for these invaluable services?

We share technical and strategic internet marketing information/software, and info about what is and isn't currently working marketing-wise. The stuff about the specific campaigns he's running came up only after more than a year of such exchanges. Also he isn't giving me his landing pages, his advertiser contact info, etc., and he knows I'd never touch something as legally questionable as a tech support scam anyway. But of course at some point when talking to others, after long enough, you talk about what you are working on. I've never paid or been asked for a dime.

So your assumptions are incorrect.

They could most certainly be exaggerations in his case but the claims aren't that bad for experienced marketers. 500% ROI is a bit high for me but I wouldn't bat an eye if he had said half that.

People share stuff in the internet marketing industry/this niche, just like other industries. It's how things work.

My gut instinct is to have government hold these advertising platforms accountable for fighting this more effectively but I know that's a total mess waiting to happen because how do you measure the effectiveness of mitigation? I guess one option would be allowing merchants to recoup charge backs from the ad platforms but connecting the charge backs with the individual ads probably wouldn't be cost effective at all.

Maybe some of the active "Fake News" filtering will also (intentionally or incidentally) reduce these incidents? Would be nice.

The Indian government busted an IRS scam ring in India last October. Seventy people were arrested.[1]

It's a variation on the theme. They call Americans and impersonate the IRS, demanding payment of some imaginary taxes owed. A remarkable number of people have been gulled.

1. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-10-06/70-arrested-a...

I stopped getting calls after that! I was humored that they often called it 'IRS' rather than 'the IRS'.

> Seems like something that should be a high priority for the Indian Govt. if they want to help with India's image abroad, especially with the tech sector.

For sure. There is a similar scam where "Microsoft Tech Support" calls people who they have detected have a virus on their computers. They have called me many times and I always play along to try and waste their time as much as possible. I know it equally wastes my time, but it is for the greater good! Then when they figure out they get angry at me and yell obscenities. :)

Next time just forward them to Lenny so you don't have to waste your own time (see the sidebar at https://reddit.com/r/itslenny ) The best calls end up on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/ToaoDotNet/videos?view=0&sort=p...

A lot of the major corporations have tech support based in India, so this makes these scammers even more credible.

> "brought to justice" in India.

Good luck with that.

Why do you say that?

If you've been to India, you'd see it's much closer to anarchy than the US. There's almost no respect for the law. Car drivers don't even pull over to the side of a road to let cop cars with flashing lights go by. At train stations people sell fake tickets from scam booths, and can do so for months or years because they bribe the police or are ignored.

Well according to this other article that was on the front page of HN, it can take a decade or more to bring a case to court in India http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21716019-pencha...

Please don't take my word for it, research but yourself, crime is rife and in your face. Even crime of a sexual nature. Turn the corner from gleaming skyscrapers and there is poverty, real people washing clothes and cooking utensils in sewage. Huge tech centres for the big outsourcing companies are literally across the road from slums.

100% true.

I remember reading this a few months ago: http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/fake-call-centre-scam-masterm...

I had assumed they used people with an Indian accent because that is what people expect to hear when they call tech support at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if it increases someones level of trust. Do we know these schemes are originating from India.

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