Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls? | Hacker News Reader

Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

nytimes.com

34 pointsgraaben8 comments

The sheer volume of the vehicle warranty center calls blows my mind. How is the FTC not all over this?

One reason seems to be that the calls seem to be made by fly-by-night call centers and are selling as 3rd party affiliates of otherwise "legitimate" companies.

I use quotes around legitimate because they really aren't legitimate. But they work enough at arm's length to the crooked call centers that they manage to avoid getting shut down.

This is very common practice in a lot of scams now. I think we need some new legislation requiring the vetting of affiliates that bring in more than X dollars.

I get three of these calls a day. They probably bought Ajit Pai a Big Mac and collectively fantasized how awesome it will be.

Pai did try to push companies to adopt authenticated calls voluntarily. His hand was forced by congress later on https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/ajit-pai-follows...

I guess in theory at some point this year everyone will have gotten on board by the deadline and the telcos can start providing more technical options to stomp out the calls.

Check out Jim Browning's videos [1] He records what he does through hacking into the scammer's computers to even record their webcams. He documents it all and even contacts victims if they are in the middle of being scammed when he is monitoring it.

Place to share these scams and phone numbers so others can harass these scammers. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning/

[2] https://www.scammer.info/

I answered one today from the IRS Federal Criminal Something-or-Other, pressed 1, was connected to a real human, and asked the guy to take me off their list. He said without hesitation "Give me $100."

I always answer and ask to be taken off their list. I know they'll never do it, but if we all do it in aggregate, it might waste so much of their time that it's no longer worth it for them.

When they say they won't take you off their list, just hang up immediately. The whole process takes only a few tens of seconds.

"Hi, yeah, this is (Sherry|Carly), and I'm a senior executive with our"

Actually, I think that there is another job description, but I can't just now remember it.

Almost certainly the Sirius Cybernetic Complaints Division

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