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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> full of Indian scammers (not meant in a racist way, but it is definitely perceived that way)

(I'm not Indian but) the non-racist way to say that is 'full of scammers', since the scammers' nationality has nothing to do with your distaste for their behaviour.

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If all your scammers are from one geographical location halfway across the world, it is fine to refer to it and you shouldn't be shamed for naming it. Lest we police ourselves into ignorance.

And if all the immigrants you don't like are from the same place?

That’s completely different, because it’s based on your personal opinion/attitude towards certain people. On the other hand, calling scammers who they are is not subjective (unless you’re falsely accusing someone).

'Who they are' is scammers, it's not relevant that some of them are Indian.

My point is that it's the same because the 'personal opinion/attitude towards certain people' is that all of them are Indian.

It's as racist as saying 'I'm sick of these Poles taking our jobs'. The truthful existence of Polish economic migration doesn't make it not a racist attitude.

Only if you are having a conversation where the demographics of the scammers has relevance.

In the case of discussing LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter where the scammers are from. The adjective is redundant in this context.

In this thread, almost any other adjective would have allowed the main meaning of the sentence to continue uninterrupted (“filthy scammers”, “frustrating scammers”, “purple scammers”, “fearless scammers”). “Scammers” already includes a negative connotation. By adding a redundant adjective to an already pejorative noun, you run the risk of imparting some of that negativity onto the adjective as well. This easily leads to the perception of racism.

I don't agree with that. By giving the unique location you have indicated there is a big problem that is perhaps more solvable than it would have been otherwise, since there is a limited group of people, many who are presumably organized, in a specific location. That is something much easier for LinkedIn to deal with than a generalized trend to scam the site from around the world, presumably with a much greater variety of tactics and targets.

No, that's still not quite right. While it removes considerations of race from the comment, it also removes context since it makes it sound as if the scamming is equally distributed globally when everyone knows it isn't.

A) If you're going to throw out blanket statements about "Indian scammers" then you need to do a little better than "everyone knows".

B) Removing the context ("Indian") from OPs post does absolutely nothing to diminish your understanding of the problem (too many scammers dirtying the pool).

I don’t know how my perception came to be like this during the recruitment time... and I’m very sorry for it. I know it’s a demographic perception and in no way I’m gonna extrapolate from that experience in future.

Also, there seems to be an Angular rickandmorty heroes-like tutorial somewhere available in the Indian speaking web, as literally all of the scammers had exactly the same codebase with various differing mistakes or variable names, but with identical structure in their github profile, and all uploaded it just a couple weeks ago.

(And they all claimed to have years of experience with it, of course)

'Indian' in this case is the geography, not the demographic. They explained that, albeit with a lot of words. 'Scammers from India' would've taken care of the whole thing. Or if they wanted to gird their loins / show their work a bit more, maybe something like 'scammers with Indian IP addresses.'

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