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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

If you read an indictment such as this Indian tech support scam from last month, they nabbed multiple guys in different airports on different flights, presumedly using sealed court orders combined with scanning names of aircraft passenger lists, then having appropriate federal or local police at the airport to handle the arrest upon boarding or deboarding.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ri/pr/five-tied-millions-dollar...

The Russians or whoever it was could use this to warn individuals (ie state hackers) from flying because of sealed arrest warrants for very serious cases.

This is very serious indeed. And that’s only one scenario.

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> over a nine-month period beginning in August 2018, he routed nearly 20,000 “Tech Fraud” scheme calls to call centers in India. Many of the callers hung-up shortly after making contact with a call center operator. However, approximately 7,524 callers remained on the line with call center operators for more than 20 minutes.

30% made it to >20 mins? Even on my best day, I can’t keep them on for more than 5 minutes.

I highly recommend watch this if you don’t believe the numbers are real.

https://youtu.be/xb_rgQ4IDS8

Jim Browning fully owned the Indian scamming company (including CCTV cameras and live calls with UK people) and should be awarded for his work.

Tech support scammers are a massive problem, the US justice dept has only just scratched the surface.

Indeed, IIRC some of his work has exposed spreadsheets showing people being scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and these call centers easily make 5 figures a month just extracting money from the unknowing.

"Kitboga" on YT manages to keep scammers on call for hours and hours, quite amusing that in the end he's the one gaining monetarily as his videos sometimes get millions of views.

> "Kitboga" on YT manages to keep scammers on call for hours and hours, quite amusing that in the end he's the one gaining monetarily as his videos sometimes get millions of views.

At some point, you begin to wonder if they’ve started to script calls for max lols.

My record is 40 minutes. I let them play in a VM.

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