US breaks up IRS phone scam operation
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That said, the robocall problem is getting worse, not better. Robocall volume is at an all-time high: https://robocallindex.com/
In many respects, the problem of telephone spam today is similar to the problem of email spam in the early 2000s. Litigating against spammers had limited efficacy, so the community developed blacklists, better filtering, and stronger authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC).
Until the major carriers get serious about similar steps, especially filtering and authentication (i.e. SHAKEN and STIR), these fraudulent calls won't stop. And, in the interim, vulnerable populations will continue to be disproportionately victimized.
If carriers became financially liable for robocalls by a government mandated date, e.g. 2020, they would find a solution. Even if was as simple as not getting paid to carry spam traffic (as opposed to an EU level % of global revenue fine).
You can fairly easily make the code whatever you want or make it a multi step process.
[1] https://www.asterisk.org/products/telephony-interface-cards
I believe I'm at something like 6/10ths of 1 cent per minute.
The collateral damage are systems that have you mark your place in line and call you back. It seems like these could be manually whitelisted though with some ingenuity.
I've been thinking about issuing my friends and family priority access PINs. If they save it to their contact entry for me after the number, I can entirely gate access. e.g. "5558675309,9876" Especially if combined with a time condition e.g. 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/30/15906800/verizon-anti-spa...
Seems like they would like to unclog their Network not to mention their servers have to handle and store all the voicemails.
It may only be a fraction of a cent per minute, but these are the same telecoms that will gladly send you a bill every month because you owe them 1 cent.
These days with unmetered calling, the receiving telco still makes some money off incoming calls through termination charges.
I'm talking to random scammers more now because I'm looking for a job and I feel like I have to answer the phone even if I don't recognize the number. Man it is annoying.
Zero spam for me for a long time. Yes, zero!
Also see the T Mobile spam service. There's two you have to turn on IIRC.
YouMail for voicemail is good too.
If you are asking whether you can call and be called by canadians for free from american gvoice, the answer to that is yes.
But these are all on my work-phone and government agencies don't pay taxes anyway.
My personal phone has been relatively safe for unknown reasons that I'm happy about.
So yeah it happens, though probably less blindly than US and more from information sharing.
I just don't answer my phone anymore unless I recognize the incoming number. And caller ID is trivially easy to spoof. Thankfully nobody spoofs any of the numbers of my top 50 contacts.
In addition to marking calls as scam, now they simply block them outright. Getting approximately 0 scam calls in the past 2 days.
These calls are spam for phones. Certainly, there's an obvious pattern that can be identified and then neutralized.
None the less, can't the phone providers detect the excessive outgoing traffic? And if it's a residential number can't that raise a red flag?
I have a test/dev phone that I used for a project several years ago with an associated ph#. I forgot about it (don't think about the charges accrued 8^) for several years, but just charged it and turned it on.
It's a number that was never used or answered for 3 years and it gets several scam calls a day. They must be calling every valid number.
Most people leave a voicemail. Thanks to technology, the voice mails get transcribed and I can quickly decide whether I should return the call.
I also see “Spam Likely” for a whole range of numbers. Not sure if it’s Apple or T-mobile but I sure do appreaciate the heads up.
The US government isn't in the business of running the internet or phone or micropayment systems, and it's not interested.
I live in Europe, but do not receive robocalls at all (zero), while when I enter the US, and put in my US SIM, I immediately start getting multiple per day.
It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation with these sorts of laws, and the prevalence of phone scams.
> Most taxpayers in the UK are taxed at source and so do not need to complete a Self Assessment Tax Return. ‘Taxed at source’ means that the money you receive has already had tax taken off, such as the wages you get from your employer when paid under the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system, or UK bank interest taxed at source.
Also: 96% of the Dutch speak English, and the Scandinavian countries aren't far behind.
Later versions of Android really help with the 'spam call' filtering, though I've noticed that callers tend to just recycle through nonsense caller IDs and/or unknown numbers (which is really annoying if you have clients phoning you from unknown numbers).
At one point I was getting 10+ a day, which seems to have calmed down now. Everything from tax scams, to PPI, to car accidents.
So I don't think this is the reason.
I’m probably going to get downvotes but this is what I’ve experienced in the US, at-least in the hyper growth Silicon Valley.
It's part legal enforcement and part culture. There are dishonest individuals in every country.
That would root out domestic telcos who enable bad behavior. What happens when the origin telco is in another jurisdiction?
I have a hunch that no telco wants to entirely block a foreign telco because they would lose money and because of the ensuing chaos.
Robocall friendly service providers intentionally mix robocalls with legitimate traffic to avoid terms of service enforcement. e.g. Robocalls are laundered by splitting across n carriers so spam (identified by bad ASR/ACD stats) stays below each carrier's threshold. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339739
Once someone does this, legitimate telephone companies elsewhere will become interested as well, and may "play nice" so long as local laws allow it.
That is not correct. You can send legitimate calls with spoofed caller id between different countries. Many providers will let you do that. (as in, you can assign a caller id from country A to a call originating from country B to A)
There are literally treaties that govern phone traffic that would have to be updated. Most telcos are a monopoly or oligopoly and don't care about customer dissatisfaction. It's not like there's a substitute to the PSTN ready to go. Are you going to tell all of your contacts you are only reachable through Skype/Hangouts/Facetime? Cutting off a spammy foreign telco would also hurt revenue.
Frankly, the definition of telecom fraud should include corporations ripping off their customers not just petty criminals getting free calls.
For example if you go to another country with your mobile phone, your call will be international, but the caller id would not match the source.
If the major carriers don't soon understand the magnitude of the telephone spam/scam problem and treat it seriously, They will soon be crippling their business. While this is been likened here to the email spam problem in 2000, back then, everyone in the computer industry took the spam problem much more seriously telephone industry does now. E.,g., Verizon gleefully offers a blacklist where you can block 20 numbers (nevermind that the spam calls typically have spoofed caller IDs) -- they think they’re good, and it’s utterly useless.
They really need to implement a true Source ID (regardless of the presented caller ID), and a way to instantly flag calls as spam then do targeted tracking and prosecution. If they fail to do this or implement another effective solution, I expect they will lose a century-old line of business to new habits that work around the established habits.
Sounds like the Prisoner’s Dilemma paid off for that third person.
If you're new here, they both sound the same because they are: People asking money for stupid reasons. E.g. mis-applied payments, a "1st-world" banking system where payments take several days, lack of chip-and-PIN resulting in overdrafts and failed bill payments.
In some places, if a reporter stops by your work to ask you questions, you'll lose your job if you don't answer them, because the newspaper is the government. In the USA, it's usually the opposite.
It takes a while to sort it all out.
Have you got some examples? I don't think I ever got a call asking me for money. Or at least not one that I needed to act on immediately - a call from letting agency to check my rent payment would be the closest, but it was both verified and done outside of the call.
I have gotten fraud alert calls from my bank or card issuer. When I got those, I would thank them, hang up and dial the number on the back of my card. Usually legit, but once it was not.
A guy called claiming to be from our bank. He said there were suspicious transactions in our recent account history, and he had some information about us. He knew our names, address, phone numbers, and even the last 4 digits of our social security numbers. He asked her to confirm her debit card number, and she gave it to him.
There's something surprising about a stranger having your personal information. It makes you think they're legitimate. My wife has a pile of degrees, and they still managed to trick her.
Sure iTunes gift cards sound strange to you, but the idea of asking for a cheque is unbelievable for a lot of the modern and developing world.
But in North America, I have gotten calls regarding payments from smaller vendors. My ISP likes money, so they’ve called me when my credit card expired. As has my dentist when a claim only went through 90%.
The IRS is big and scary, but if you get a call from xyz inc saying you owe money and this is your last chance before it goes to court, that is scary, and it could be true.
The phrases that keep them on the line the longest get played in the pool more frequently.
Long recordings get automatically posted to youtube.
They're so internet 1.0, we need to get to 2.0!
Is there any realistic chance of Indian law enforcement catching up with these guys?
Man I didn't know corporate and financal crime put up a home office. That's pretty brazen.
Its a standard tactic among police in India with regards to any crime/criminal.
Its very common for them to work for the the criminals. I remember a few years back there was an anti-corruption raid on a police inspectors home(in Koramangala, Bangalore) and in the gold jewelry recovered many residents complained it was the same jewelry stolen from their home a few years back. In short, the police helped the thieves to steal(provide information, logistical support and guard the home while the thief is stealing) and shared the spoils :) :)
Here is one more such case: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/police-he...
Recently there was a journalist whose scooter was stolen by the cops and was caught on CCTV.
In these cases the cops would have been paid off, its only when the crime becomes intolerable and larger media attention catches on do they act per law. Some times they even pay off the judges in lower courts.
Had to google that as I wondered how they managed to catch him in another country.
(have you been in an accident bots are around, but you don't get calls every day or multiple calls per day as a normal thing)
The story I've heard several times from different people about how it's handled in Poland - your operator usually subcontracts their support & telemarketing to a third party; some spammer will pay an employee of that third party to "liberate" their customer database as they end their employment.
Bonus: a FU to warrantless NSA metadata spying.
>“hundreds of millions” of dollars
I guess I'm not scamming anyone out of anything but if I was and got a million.... I like to think I'd be smart enough to burn everything and enjoy...
I hear people all the time saying "if I made a startup and sold if for millions of dollars, I'd retire and never work again", when most people who do make millions on their startup continue to work. It's that work ethic that is what made them that multi-million dollar startup.
Whether criminal or not, there's a particular work ethic that keeps people like this making more money when they could retire happily.
The dude who sold their startup doesn't have much to lose at that point to take another shot.
The criminal though who goes for that extra million can lose it all.
Very different risks and stuff to weigh.
Thank goodness criminals are dumb!
Are they all dumb, or is it that only dumb ones get caught and you end up reading about them, while the smart ones carry on undetected?
This is not just with scams and crimes, but even with good things.
I say I have to go look for it. So I randomly make noises like opening doors, closing drawers, shuffling papers. I had one on the line for 10 minutes before he gave up.
After a couple doses of "the treatment", they stop calling. Blessed relief!
This method works because it costs them human time. Just hanging up on their robot, or their human, doesn't work. They just call again.
Hilariously quite a lot of calls are "Google SEO" related, scammy sounding credit offers, and political donation solicitations.
The article mentions restitution. Does anyone know how he could find out if he's eligible?
You can add some prestige to calling someone (having a human answering and screening your calls for you) at a pretty low cost (1 minute per call? 2-3 cheap workers could cover the whole biz, could share lines between ~ 50-100 people with distinct sounding names). eliminate all unsolicited calls for the customer.
sip:13475147296@in.callcentric.com or plain old 1-347-514-7296
A lot of spam callers hang up once I say I'm transferring them, but sometimes they talk to Lenny until the whole script loops!
Would be interesting to know more about this. In the legit call center business the phone numbers of people who have previously bought something are more valuable. The ability to target specific demographics is probably a prerequisite for a scam like this, calling randomly would be really expensive.
Most people who need to speak to me attempt to contact me via different means anyways. I don't have much faith they will ever fix PSTN that I'm dreaming for the day I can start ignoring all calls.
By the time I received the IRS letters, I typically had to respond within a matter of days or face additional penalties (what if I was on vacation). Even the most basic of cross checking my tax forms would have clearly shown everything was legit. And these were by no means unusual or complex tax situations, just very basic things that millions of Americans report on their taxes every year. But even though I knew everything was above board, the tax laws are so convoluted that I was in constant fear the IRS would still find some BS reason I owed them more money.
Collective action problem [1]. Namely, our system requires people to document and report such problems. Few people do. As a result, certain problems get disproportionate interest compared to others.
- Ask international callers to use an app instead.
I used to get calls every day and after doing this it stopped.
Anyone can set up a bunch Asterisk or Freeswitch servers anywhere in the world and use VOIP. How does it know where the "real" origin is.