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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

By the time the lawsuit wends its way through the courts, all that will be left is a shell and a secret bank account in the Cayman islands that we cannot discover.

And the scammers will be on to something new.

But at least I won't be getting calls in Chinese any more...

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The current problem is a kind of technological loophole. Scammers outside the US can anonymously and for (almost) free perform what are basically phishing attacks on everyone with a phone. Unlike other kinds of internet-based scams, there is no technology layer like spam filters that can screen calls for people since they spoof whatever area code and number they want. It needs to be fixed.

And you should read about these "scammer districts" in India. They didn't exist not that long ago and sprang up overnight as this "opportunity" arose. Most of the employees aren't exactly the cream of the crop by India or anyone else's standards. Make it take more effort and brain power to scam people and you drastically reduce the number of scammers.

First, they're often offshore already, and second, they often use spoofed caller id's. The upshot is they might not even need to hide.

The scammers are. The companies being targeted are onshore. Which is why the USA can get to them.

My point is that the people in charge have every reason to believe that the government will crack down on them, and have had all the time that they need to try to hide the money. By the time the courts are done, there will be no money to find.

But perhaps some more property in London will be secretly owned: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/17/100-billion-...

The spoofed caller ID thing really needs to be fixed. Our office number ends in a nice round number XXX-XXX-8000 and several times a day we get calls back saying "WHY DID YOU JUST CALL ME" and they don't believe me when I tell them we didn't and somebody's spoofing caller id. Spoofing Caller ID to someone else's number shouldn't be possible. (But it's very easy. I can enter any phone number I want in our phone system here!)

> Spoofing Caller ID to someone else's number shouldn't be possible.

Right, this is why we have certificates for websites. I want to know it's my bank I'm logging in to. I'd also like to know it really is my bank that's calling...

Note that this action does not target the individuals conducting the calls; this lawsuit targets VOIP "gateway carriers" based in the U.S. who carry the VOIP calls onto U.S. copper telecommunication (as described in the article).

Yes.

And the "gateway carriers" have a corporate shell and people who are intimately involved with scams of all sorts. Which is why they got in the business of enabling other scams.

When they see the writing on the wall, do you not think that the ones in charge won't try to sneak all of the money that they can out of the company into somewhere it can't be traced, that they can pick up later?

But the actual complaint does indeed target a single U.S. individual from New York behind the various companies.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1240031/downl...

A single US individual listed on the paperwork.

Will they manage to match that to a breathing body?

Nick Palumbo who is named lives 5 minutes away from me and I see him at Trader Joe's regularly. He is a real person, now both him and his wife are screwed pretty bad

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