Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
The reason carriers -- from the local exchange carriers and up -- ignore it is because just a single scam operation can mean 10s of thousands of dollars in volume a month, and sometimes more. Since they have to self-report for the most part they're not very incentivized to stop it. There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it, but carriers push back hard on those regulations and they never stick.
I know from experience dealing with this that it's absolutely not ignorance that's at play on the regulatory and commercial side. It's disgusting, and as fueled with greed and red tape as you'd fear.
Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal
And when scammers go back to using Western Union are you going to ban that as well? When they ask a person to send them cash are you going to ban cash as well? Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.
You might be on to something here.
Gift cards are just slightly less evil than payday loan services. They take advantage of a (positive) human need to give, and a (negative) human need to not work hard, picking out a gift, and a (negative) need to appear to have purchased a gift when one, in fact, has not. What makes it even more evil is that because it's a gift the loss is not seen as important for the giver (they gave it away after all) or the receiver (they weren't expecting to have this thing). The burden on the receiver, to carry around this extra piece of plastic, having to remember to use it, possibly even altering your behavior to use it, makes it even more nefarious.
I don't think my position is particularly common. Certainly gift card industry fraud is low on the list of societies pressing problems. But it is a problem and one that I wish was better understood .
Most of the losses (in $ terms) from these scams do not involve gift cards. They involve the scammers convincing you to install some remote desktop software and emptying your bank account.
It's already illegal to send people to open bank accounts with fake IDs, but the scammers have no problem cashing out the bulk of their profits like that.
Some may bounce the money through a few accounts and eventually into a business account that'll send it overseas, it depends.
The people on the ground are random replaceable idiots.
"We can't fix X because then sector Y would suffer trillions in losses and jobs so it's best to keep the status quo and kick the can down the road."
Normally we could petition our elected officials and get something done about it. But lobbyists have come to so completely dominate our legislative process that whole industries have effectively coopted the government through regulatory capture.
On top of that, they've hoodwinked half the population into thinking that regulation bad.
At this point, we can all remain hypervigilant and snoop on our grandparents and get sucked into various private industry scams like identity insurance. We can play games with switching carriers within the duopolies in our areas when they let scammers steal from us. We can project loudly on social media when someone across the world steals right from out of our bank accounts, and haggle with our credit card companies to charge it back and rip off some merchant so that we don't have to pay. This is how scams metastasize into protection rackets and authoritarianism.
Or we could like, make this all illegal and charge carriers directly when it happens. But that would cost rich people money. So rich people run propaganda campaigns to convince us that fines just get passed on to consumers. Which doesn't make any sense in a free market, where we could switch to a cheaper carrier that didn't get fined.
Once we see this from that meta level (that political controversy is rooted in misdirection and lies) it just gets so tiring to watch the same debates over and over. Maybe we need some rich people to step up and call out this nonsense (dragons give up their loot so easily). Maybe we need to organize and start some consumer unions that dictate to vendors how much we'll pay for their services until they shape up. Maybe we should get back to our geek roots and start a free peer to peer wireless network.
Huh, writing out this rant, I just had a thought. Where's the keystone in this? Political progress can't be hacked, so none of our instincts around quick fixes work. In other words, the half of the population that has the working solution has to somehow convince the other half to go along with it. That can be a long and painful process spanning decades.
So what does the other half want? What concession to them would result in getting legislation passed to solve this?
To comment on a now deleted post to this comment: I’m not arguing that bad regulation doesn’t exist which can perpetuate and help continue market failures. I’m arguing that good regulation is the fix to known market failures and economists on both sides recognize that.
Even conservative economists (and for that matter, also other experts) usually aren't dumb, but I've never seen one of them act on their knowledge appropriately. They all prioritize their ideology and their donors, some of them even refuse to listen to science and facts when people die by the masses.
Milton Friedman
And as I point out in my sibling comment, bad regulation is the reason this problem exists: because telcos are not legally able to block most spam calls. If not for this regulation, telcos would have solved spam callers long ago by blocking suspected sources of spam. (Instead, they do work-arounds like labeling them "scam likely.")
https://www.robokiller.com/robocall-blocking-technology
Under the Governmental backing turndown arrow:
We’re fighting behind the scenes to get government support for better fighting robocalls. The FCC’s TRACED Act is just one piece of legislation we’re behind that will increase penalties for robocallers–but there’s far more work that needs to be done.
I realized a TL;DR of my rant after writing it:
Organized crime is stealing from members of the community and the police rarely succeed in returning stolen property. The mayor claims to be trying to help, but mostly works at reelection. Half the community wants to pass a law to fine a middleman who sees crime occurring but does little to stop it. The other half claims that the law itself facilitates the crime and wants to cancel more laws. Some people hire a watchdog to prevent the crime, and that seems to work. Others feel that if the crime affects the whole community, then a solution should be part of the commons, because vulnerable and/or impoverished members of the community would be left defenseless otherwise.
I'm in that second camp. I feel that a conservative argument here is: if I have to be bothered by every little thing because the government can't do its job to defend the community and the security of its property, then that's not a republic, it's anarchy.
When you have one (or a small number of) providers, in a high-barrier-to-entry industry, that provides a critical service - this gives these providers enormous power over us if they were to refuse to do business with us or charge us higher rates. Think water, electric, shipping/postal, internet access, telco, etc.
What if the postal service decided to stop doing business with you, perhaps because of the offensive content of the letters you want to send? Or nobody will ship your merchandise because they don't approve of it? Or your internet provider cancels you? And what if there are a small number of them that collude on these bans, so now you can't even switch providers?
By designating certain industries as "common carriers" it prohibits them from denying service to anyone for any reason, except for particularly obvious, egregious and illegal reasons.
If you want to send out Nazi propaganda newsletters to people who have requested them - the US Postal Service will (and should, I believe) deliver them for you.
We should not allow telcos to decide who's calls to put through. This is a job for legislators and law enforcement, however imperfect those solutions are.
I'm not sure how much was commercial benefit vs lazyness/no incentive to solve the issue directly - the telcos aren't making a lot of money on inbound calling. It's just a problem that didn't impact them directly - only their customers.
The second side of the regulation miss is that carriers have to self-report much of the time. These centers pay into the 6 figures monthly to their carriers. The carriers know exactly what kind of traffic is being sent through and many times aide these scammers in shaping the traffic to look more legit. Auto-warranty scams in the past? Huge amounts of that traffic were routed through the likes of Y-Tel and a couple others. Regulators knew this but enforcement took years to happen. It's the same right now.
Lastly is the issue of what happens once enforcement occurs? The answer is not great: The scammers change numbers and keep going. They aren't local and it's not cut and dry when it comes to continuous enforcement against foreign entities. Their carriers still support them and the fines are typically less than a month's revenue from the larger outfits (think Uber).
Better meta-data helps aide robo / scam / spam blockers. IMO, we should just shut down these carriers who knowingly aide these scammers. We know who they are, they aren't hard to find.
https://www.engadget.com/robocall-company-may-receive-the-la...
Since texting and even back from the AIM/IRC generation - when I was in college 20 years ago, with T9, people were already primarily were texting not calling.
Apparently this has just recently changed, but telcos are highly regulated in the US and they are legally required to execute calls placed by their customers. This means that they have to be very very sure the call should be blocked before doing so, otherwise they face legal liability. This regulatory structure means that call spamming in the US is all but legally protected.
Compare this to less-regulated email, where Gmail and other providers are free to block spam based on any reason: source ip, domain, content of the email, etc.
What are these easy few regulatory/technical mechanisms?
My parents have had to cancel their main debit card twice in the past year because they've given out the number to someone they thought was with their bank.
My neighbor (in her 80s) almost gave her SSN to somebody who claimed to be with Social Security.
I knew a guy who lost his entire retirement to scammers and had to give up his dream of retiring to Florida.
I'm sad to say it, but it's more dangerous than ever to be old or naive. In the old days, the scammers had to come to you. The internet has made it trivial to carry out scam operations from the other side of the world, and everyone who COULD do something (especially the FCC and telcos) seems to be indifferent and apathetic.
was v sad because he felt supreme humiliation over the matter.
The really weird bit is they didn't ask him to send any money out. They knew his address and some "police" showed up an hour later demanding he write them a check.
This is in Canada. They've apparently found the guy, but there's some difficulties because he's in a different province.
I know this is a tangent to your comment but after seeing my parents and others their age do similar things to what you describe it makes me wonder about voting and driving with no age limits or proof of non-dementia.
Just like email phishing educating the public is very laborious but it is the ultimate solution. There will still be a few people who fall for scams no matter how extensive the PSA campaigns.
You need to fix scams at the source: sanction India and other countries until they kick up efforts to neutralize scammers, and replace insecure systems like SSN.
In that case, let’s ask for cognitive tests to gain the right to vote! Unfortunately there will be people who will never be capable of passing the test even during their 20s or 30s. Those who cannot pass the test could be less capable thanks to the environment (poor neighborhoods, poor education, bad childhood, missing one or two parents, exposed to toxic chemicals during pregnancy) or simply less lucky in the genetic side.
Are we ready to take away the right to vote from old people even if they are more capable than you and me? If not, are we ready to take away the right to vote from less privileged people?
It will get orders of magnitude worse once all this can be fully automated by AI (including a completely realistic video or voice call by the grandson where he talks about killing the pregnant woman).
One needs to provide clear instructions for a single good scam when explicitly asked to do so, the other would need to provide good defenses to any number of scams and be more or less self-activated.
There's also the matter of risks entailed by having large swathes of the population increasingly under the direct supervision of artificial minds (controlled by who?).
I suspect something like this will happen though, and that one of the key uses of artificial intelligence will be as both an offensive and a defensive weapon for deceit and manipulation. Indeed the offensive part would seem to be a natural continuation of the enormous resources poured into ml-driven engagement maximization and the quest for sufficiently politically correct AIs. As an example ChatGTP is evidently explicitly designed to lie about some things, including its own capabilities. I'm not sure what, if anything, currently exists on the defensive front.
Yeah for voice calls nothing yet though the likes of Google/Apple could probably do something. Against your point that bad AI is easier, you have that Google/Apple have more resources than the scammers.
I've got my parents to essentially keep just the bare minimum in their bank accounts, to cancel all debit cards, and keep all extra funds in fixed deposits that you can't withdraw from online (have to visit the branch).
Then there are some variations of these - e.g. the politician and criminal is the same person or in the same family, the criminal also does some legit work, the criminal does mostly legit work and lot of it is goverment projects or projects running on tax money (which are done badly or subcontracted and money flows back partly as kick-backs).
This cycle is hard to break unless some serious reforms are brought it, but then why would the politicians break the very system which brings them so much power and money.
Even the “good” systems don’t work, like water, electricity, or traffic/transportation. So whatever, I can see why they are okay with a “bad” but working system.
Nonetheless, it’s quite dysfunctional.
In the EU I get maybe one spam call every couple of months. From the stories you hear from Americans on HN, Americans get multiple spam/scam calls a day, and the vast majority of their inbound calls are spam/scams.
What is going wrong in the US that isn't going wrong in the EU? Language barrier? Regulatory capture?
Bless the people keeping that red list up to date.
This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.
almost all my inbound calls are spam, in the united states. when i've listened to voicemails left, they even have native north american accented people reading the prerecorded scripts, so there's deep roots to the depravity that cross country borders.
Sometimes but not consistently.
Though honestly in the US I get maybe one SPAM call or text a week these days.
We do have that, but it probably depends on the carrier and the type of phone you have. On my iPhone with Verizon, there's a setting to "Silence Junk Callers", in which "calls identified by Verizon as potential spam or fraud will be silenced, automatically sent to voicemail, and displayed on the Recents list."
It's not perfect, though, and I still get a ton of spam calls. As a rule I almost never answer the phone if I don't recognize the number.
Yes, of course we do. Verizon and T-Mobile, at the very least, mark calls as "likely spam" reliably. Can't speak for any carriers as I've not been a customer of theirs for some time.
1. It was introduced only within the last couple of years, even though spam calls have been happening for much longer than that 2. A bunch of calls escape the “spam likely” designation even though I’m on one of the major carriers
So I’d say although we have it, it’s not nearly as reliable as I’d expect it to be.
As far as I know the solution is to require more anti-spoofing techniques (e.g. SHAKEN/STIR) for caller ID and then cut off the carriers who don't provide that, plus the carrier providing the numbers enforcing stronger terms on their users.
I think the US gets targeted mostly because of language. Indians learn English in school and it's not uncommon for a legitimate call in the US to come from someone with a strong accent.
No one in the EU (outside UK) will receive a call in English and think this is legitimate
In the US if you call any company you would expect someone with an accent
Here in NL, however, it does seem like scammers are occasionally taking advantage of the comparatively high English proficiency and are trying to scam people in English - this one was doing the rounds for a while: https://www.fraudehelpdesk.nl/alert/engels-telefoontje-namen...
I think several other countries conduct a lot of business in English, but I haven't spent enough time in Europe to know this for sure.
It's not like Indian scammers are beholden to EU law but not US law.
It’s not an ideals problem. Even very conservative economists would agree that there exists a negative externality in the transaction between the call center and the telecom company on the person being called where there should be some cost on the transaction to account for that externality.
So, it’s not even a conservative liberal thing (intentionally not using party names as those names may not reflect conservative or liberal ideals). It’s a policy problem. Write your member of congress.
I regularly get spam calls in Chinese. My best guess is this is because if they randomly dial Bay Area area codes they sometimes get Chinese people.
Turkey doesn't have much interest in stopping this. One could argue they have quite a few bigger problems, crime related or not, to try and shut down a source of foreign currency. Same as India.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyEoOfSECp0
Indian knows english. It's hard to target non-english speakers.
The reason being someone is reaping massive benefits from whatever loophole allows for this kind of data collection & is shoring up initiatives so that loophole isn't plugged.
Now try the same search with a U.K. resident or E.U. resident you know of. I'd say you will have a markedly tougher time gaining access to similar information, with just a few clicks & without ever pulling out your credit card. I have no clue if U.K. is similarly compromised off late but a few years ago ( prior to Brexit ) it was not the case.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/europol-phone-...
When I worked in telefony abuse, like this, was pretty hard to track because of all the middlemen involved. They'd have phone banks with multiple phone numbers that they'd lease from providers in India who worked with them to rotate through outbound numbers. India doesn't allow Americans telefony companies, much less voip (in order to provide these telefony companies business), so looking at India from a telefony perspective is much like looking at several black boxes.
Tldr; because of India's policies the country of India has to do something about it. Much like Chinese knockoffs and IP theft.
I don't at all subscribe to the Friedman perspective that businesses are ethically obligated to maximize profits at the expense of literally everything else, but I do think that it's a reasonable description of the way businesses trend toward acting; an entity structurally designed for making profits will inevitably end up acting in a way that only considers that measure unless the incentives are changed, which is precisely why we _do_ need to regulate things to curtail business behavior that's a net bad for society as a whole by making it unprofitable, whether that's through direct fines or making business liable either civilly or criminally for their actions.
Pretty much everyone who communicates overseas use apps now because they’re free.
The problem is that the US carrier gets paid for terminating the call, regardless of whether it's spam or not. Why would they kill the golden goose?
de facto sanctioned by India and USA by not enforcing the law and busting the scammers
US must take strict actions and call out India publicly. Elderly people are weak, education isn't going to solve the scam problem. Scammers must be punished harsly. They erode the trust in system.
Also, Indian government is not doing anything. In many places like Kolkata, scammers can get away easily by bribing police. Our phone are being redirected to India, and they can abuse our phone number. I wish, the US government passes strict rules and regulations to keep these scammers in check.
Gift cards should require some amount of destruction in order to get to the actual barcode… something to make tampering obvious.
The same way clothes have a little ink exploder the clerk removes… just a quick easy step that is destructive to the packaging… but still presentable when you give it to someone
Just put something along the lines of "sim box grey route" into Google and you'll find loads of relevant industry materials.
Besides, you're drastically moving the goalposts here. We went from "could put a stop to this" to minor obstacles.
But as long as telcos willingly cooperate and allow remote call centers to basically pick any number in the locality of the recipient even though that number is not currently roaming in India they are making things much worse.
The reason for this is language barriers, it's not some countries doing things better than others.
> Shipping a SIM box would already be much more work than just changing a number in a database
They don't even actually need to ship one, there are thousands of them operational already. This is a massive industry.
Even if you cracked down hard on SIM boxes, the scammers will just purchase routing from botnets. This won't really impact their costs, and will be essentially impossible to take any meaningful action against.
Anyway, since you are willing to shoot down each and every suggestion in this thread short of rolling over and accepting the damage how would you tackle it?
European authorities haven't managed to do anything about the car selling scams Romanians have been running for decades now. Nobody has managed to do anything about the Nigerian prince scams. BEC with truly shitty phishing pages keeps on growing and growing.
The best bet would be for US authorities to force India to crack down on these activities and prevent these scams from operating at an industrial scale.
The actions you propose would work well to address lower return activities, such as marketing robocalls. They can not work to address high-return scams.
Plenty of such cases here locally. Your point about the language barrier is on the money though, I never really gave that much thought but the number of Dutch speakers in India is most likely so low and the market so small that it isn't worth a massive campaign to them. Especially not if there are millions of gullible people in markets that are more accessible to them.
As for forcing Indian authorities: I've seen up close how corrupt things are there and I have very little hope that that would be a viable avenue to resolution of this problem.
I'd be super curious to hear about any local success stories.
>As for forcing Indian authorities: I've seen up close how corrupt things are there and I have very little hope that that would be a viable avenue to resolution of this problem.
Then you're left with education. These scams are very profitable and can easily afford resistance from telcos and banks.
I don’t see why you’re pushing so hard against this line of reasoning, I guess. You’re making it sound like a hopeless endeavor to even try, in a “don’t lock your doors because thieves will just use lock picks” kind of way.
How much harder? If your changes increase the telephony costs of a scam call centre from 0.001% of revenue to 0.002%, you have not actually made their operations harder.
> and these changes do not impede non-fraudulent use, why not go for it?
Because these changes would not be free.
Ideally, the telco would implement these block lists, but also ideally, they could be traded around like web ad block lists for individuals to load on their phones.
I think we all know scam calls are a serious source of revenue for carriers, so they will need to be led to this conclusion by force.
None of that happy future would come without true caller id, thus the resistence from carriers to fixing spoofing.
Why would they be a major revenue source? The carriers make their money from normal users, not dodgy call centers.
Ideally there would be a warning that a call does not originate locally, routing the call through a local representative would generate yet another signal that you might be able to close off, including the possibility to declare the possession or hosting of certain gear illegal. You'd have to maybe do some pattern matching to spot problematic numbers and/or have a place to report them easily.
If the will was really there I'm pretty sure this problem could be tackled.
Anyone can easily buy European bank accounts opened with fake IDs, or money laundering services where you're provided an IBAN and receive a % of the money sent there to your cryptocurrency wallet.
Want a fake passport good enough to travel with? No problem, will just run you a 1000 euros.
Probably, but not with any of your proposed methods. I have talked with some SMS spammers and none of what you proposed would affect them. And for SMS spammers these inconveniences are a much bigger part of the cost of doing operations than for a company which needs to have employees in a call center. They have to spend a lot of money on buying new SIM cards as old ones get blocked.
Right now, an actionable report really needs a traced call, which is hard to actually make.
Certainly, it doesn't get you right to a chargable person, but it gets you a lot more than today.
However, even if we assume that SIM boxes are a magic solution to carrier interventions, that still raises the cost from the current status-quo. Implement enough of these barriers and the entire scam operation becomes unprofitable and no longer worthwhile.
>However, even if we assume that SIM boxes are a magic solution to carrier interventions, that still raises the cost from the current status-quo. Implement enough of these barriers and the entire scam operation becomes unprofitable and no longer worthwhile.
Why do you assume that the call routing is a meaningful cost to these operations? For all we know they spend less than 0.01% of their revenue on call routing.
Oh jesus please no, whats next?
Ther is no reason a consumer oven should cook more than 5 meals a day. There is no reason a consumer toasteer should toast mpre than 10 times a day.
The bread you make tourself is unauthorised in a toaster
Of course, an override should be provided - the restriction should be relaxed over time once the account is established for a long time without any complaints.
Consumer ≠ business/commercial. A home oven (or toaster, fryer etc) isn't made for such use, a commercial one is. You should really spend the monies in commercial gear if you're gonna feed such hordes of people.
Similar thing with SIM cards. Why would a normal person be making 100+ calls a day on a simple, personal line? That's clearly commercial use and as such, it oughta be regulated somehow.
However, just like email spam, stopping spoofed calls is harder in practice than in theory.
Is it really? Couldn't the carriers simply require a certificate to allow you to spoof a phone number?
SS7 doesn't have a clean way to do this hence needing to make SHAKEN/STIR, but I don't think anyone did the signalling work for POTS.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-companies-robocall-d...
Of course, businesses with a lot of money care about use cases in that last 1%.
I'd love a setting I could flip to disable inbound voice calls from any carrier that isn't like... Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Comcast.
No way to selectively block SMS on phones (at least natively). Only reason I don't disable it completely is due to the 1 percent
The FCC has started enforcement actions, in October they announced they are cutting off seven telcos who failed to comply. Only ~7000 more to go!
At some point, the way to fight crime is to fight crime. It's not that hard to find and prosecute most call centre scammers.
A lot of these scammers would not do it if there was risk. They're not often hardened criminals.
Or, you invent a shop that also trades on Amazon and "buy" the stuff from yourself. That might explain some odd shops that you see online.
The goal is to setup a US google voice number to abuse later.
This makes so much sense. Thanks!
But I had wrongly assumed that Facebook marketplace would experience less scam than craigslist because verified users would be their competitive advantage
It’s so infuriating. I know people who have lost hundreds of dollars to people impersonating US Social Security and immigration officers. The gift card providers do not care. The impersonated government agencies do not care. The local police do not care. The phone companies do not care. There is total and utter impunity for everyone perpetrating and enabling these scams.
I'm not sure if there's an alternative, since I'd seriously rather not ID be required to buy or use a gift card.
And as far as making gift cards safer, shouldn’t that be the responsibility of the gift card providers, not to mention regulators tasked with consumer safety? Why is it that the scammers seem to ask for gift cards rather than, say, banking details? (I’m sure there’s also some banking scams, but I have a feeling there’s non-zero recourse for victims in those cases.)
If it truly is somehow impossible to make gift cards safe to use, then I’m convinced society could survive without them. But I doubt it’s impossible. I suspect gift providers deliberately go out of their way to make sure victims have no recourse.
so i unpause the silence during that time
the hospital is def an issue, i don’t have a great solution there especially for unplanned emergencies.
> While TrueCaller may have laudable intentions, the privacy implications for people who end up in their database raise concerns. When a number is tagged, the person who is tagged ends up having their name and phone number stored on the TrueCaller database, despite not having consented – or even being aware – that their data was collected.
- https://privacyinternational.org/node/2997
Some of the features require excessive permissions.
- https://support.truecaller.com/support/solutions/articles/81...
- https://globalvoices.org/2022/10/14/the-true-colours-of-true...
You'd think India would be on top of this and come down hard. If folks just start associating Indian accents as 'scammers', businesses abroad that currently rely on outsourcing support and other services are going to eventually have to pull out. You can't run effective customer support if the customer assumes you're a bad actor just because of your voice and hangs up.
The vast majority of scams are “romance” scams.
These are people who don’t have accents but good job prejudicing your father against a whole group of people while not actually protecting him from scams.
do you have any sort of citation for that?
They "try", but the scammers just pay off the cops
Unfortunately, that use of that word is popular among Indians, but any half-measure guidance leaves room for an already susceptible mark to convince themselves that maybe this email is not a scam.
Be warned. AI accent changers will eliminate that line of defense as well.
I'd imagine that's even more obvious for any family member. If a family member calls from any number that's not their number, my first question will be an honest "How the heck did you remember my phone number?"
On a personal level I keep a referee's whistle handy in case I'm talking to a scammer live. They are usually wearing headsets and any damage I can do to their hearing with that may save an old persons savings in the following few minutes. Best technique is to speak softly so they turn their volume up then let rip on the whistle
Eventually we'll just have a network of AI scambots calling up AI scambaiters and having completely useless conversations in synthesized English with each other for hours upon hours and nobody will remember why.
Contrast this with how the Singapore government in a similarly highly capitalist economy dealt with this - basically telling banks - "you'd better make good the consumers & deal with your holes or else" https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/mas-will-consider-...
In many ways in domain after domain, US nowadays seems to act as the "economic proving ground of the world" where lax regulation allows a million ideas to flourish. Then folks in other parts of the world seem to take the best winning ideas, figure out how to make it work in a socially & governmentally acceptable way in other parts of the world and out-compete the US originators (eg. how Uber, Lyft, Amazon, US based social media firms have effectively been pushed out of dominance in Asia)
My grandmother got hit with one of these, she has a weak heart and was in severe mental distress all day because she couldn't get ahold of me to confirm what the scammers were telling her.
I try not to judge others, but what monster can do this for a living?
If someone is being told that yadda yadda (story doesn't matter) and they have to pay in gift cards, and they seriously believe that, then surely education seems to be the right fix.
Rule no. 1: Gift cards = scam.
Still I felt uncomfortable and asked for a Teams session with screensharing instead (and not remote access), but this 'was not possible'.
So, how are people to distinguish between 'fake' calls and real ones if companies still use such shitty techniques?
OK, looks like "microsoftsupport.com" is taken, but GoDaddy is happy to offer me alternatives like microsoftsupport.app, microsoftsupport.site, microsoftsupport.tv, or microsoftsupport.uk that should work equally well for scam purposes. Or microsoftpcsupport.com is available, if a ".com" is particularly desirable.
aka.ms
Or “cudaserv.com”, which is auto enabled link scanning for Office365
Interesting! Never knew this!
The days of friendly WHOIS are over. Never register a domain without setting the privacy flag.
I actively avoid Google products, but Google Domains is an exception. They make limited upsell appeals, their pricing is straight forward, and if it's available, they include privacy protection with the annual cost.
And they are clear about the lack of privacy protection for .us domains. This text appears when checking out: "Privacy protection is not supported for .US domains."
(My entire understanding of law comes from law and order so take what i said with a grain of salt)
Maybe requiring them to post a large bond (proportional to the liability) and/or have insurance?
I'm guessing it has something to do with the snowshoe-spamming reference, but I'm totally in the dark.
Or does it just insta-kill all their posts?
If you answer and say hello and there's an extra second just hang up. They'll call back if it is important.
"If it's an Indian, hang up."
If there's a legitimate need to get in touch, they will find another way. My (naive) hope is that this might also discourage offshoring and/or reward companies employing Americans, if enough people do likewise.
I doubt that. Instead they'll probably start using a service like https://www.respeecher.com/
If the message mentions anything about stupid stuff like tax fraud/social security number its just immediately deleted, you'd 99% of the time receive official mail for anything about these items.
Mark Rober has a few videos dedicated to going after several of these scam call centers, and most recently 3 major ones were shut down and their owners arrested.
My recollection wrt Rober was the police aided him to help drive awareness.
For the “normal peoples theft” what would you like to police to do?
- show up when called.
- if they’re not going to show up, AT LEAST call back.
- make at least a token effort to apprehend someone of whom there is a clear video.
This does not seem to be outlandish expectations of the service provided by the largest line in city budget.
Basically, our criminal justice system is not built to handle minor crimes, and criminal organizations are exploiting that at scale.
There are no consequences to the police for ignoring the parts of the job that do not directly generate revenue for the police.
This is not an overarching problem with "the criminal justice system" other than the fact that the police almost everywhere in the US have a culture of graft and rentseeking, and won't do anything if there isn't money or press involved.
These call centers are a problem.
One that requires cooperation between the US and India to resolve.
Now before you say "well India has high English proficiency" countries like Nigeria, Kenya and the Philippines best India here with higher English proficiency and don't have the issue (Nigeria has a similar email one of course) They're quite a bit poorer as well.
There's some major policy failure here India needs to figure out. Of course they don't want rampant crime but everything points to how they're domestically handling that crime as the problem here.
But no that wasn’t what I was suggesting.
https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning/featured
ScammerPayback also does an incredible job.
My grandparents are the targets for this kind of scam, and when they call their bank they get an Indian customer service rep to discuss the situation with. Absolutely disgusting that the situation has been tolerated for so long.
I'd argue that one such state is the U.S.
Congress could pretty trivially order that carriers give each customer a choice about what kinds of spoofed / unreliable-origin calls to let through.
E.g.: For calls originating (inside | outside) the U.S.: (allow-all | allow-whitelist-only | allow-only-when-presenting-callee-issued-passcode | etc.)
But Congress doesn't do this.
This isn't exactly Congress sponsoring this behavior, but I suspect there's some bribery and/or unsavory lobbying going on.
My own thesis, is because politicians, and PACs, use robocalls extensively.
They don't want you blocking their junk calls.
I doubt it, its easy enough for them to just exempt their own calls (which, incidentally, they do from existing Do-Not-Call rules.)
How so?
Its more like 1. They don't care 2. Those who care, don't have time to work on problems of Non-Citizens when the citizens are suffering too
India is a country of almost 1.4 Billion people. That is 1 Europe + 1 North America + around 200 Million people more (figures from google search, may not be accurate)
Indian law enforcement is archaic, understaffed, and riddled with corruption. They prefer to sit on their asses all day and collect paychecks rather than working. For the select few that actually work, they have all the local issues to deal with that comes with a population of that size. They simply do not have the time to work on things that are affecting someone on the other side of the planet.
And tbh I don't blame them for putting citizen's problems over non-citizens. Thats literally what every country would do.
Not to mention consistently and effectively prosecuting people for this sort of crime takes two sides of law enforcement to tango (the perpetrator of the crime may be in India, but the victim is in the United States, as is the local police report they file, the spoofed number and the first part of the telco chain that eventually ends up in a normal looking office in an Indian city). Sometimes a relevant Indian police department may get that information in a form which is useful to both shut down operations and punish the operators, but even if the Indian police were incorruptible, a model of efficiency and particularly hot on white collar crimes committed overseas, I'm not sure their US counterparts are providing so much information that scammers wouldn't feel they could get away with it often enough to try.
Best defense: don’t ever call a phone number you receive in a text or email message. Delete the message and look up your bank’s, Amazon’s, or PayPal’s phone number yourself through the company’s official web site.
Also, don’t get scared by messages about your finances…stay calm. The scammers count on you getting freaked out and doing something stupid.
I receive more spam SMS than scam calls too. Some of them are even asking me to provide information for the benefit of fake deliveries...
Worth the occasional missed call IMO; I say on my VM msg if you are calling me and I don't know you leave a message otherwise your call will go to VM without ringing.
In theory, I could get a voicemail and then follow-up, but that would result in significant time wasted for both sides (e.g., calling doctors again or setting up re-delivery), and the total time I spent on dealing with spam calls is ~1 minute (5-10 seconds x 5-10 occurrences).
Snail mail is so overloaded with spam it might as well be the same.
The fact two fundamental and official mass communication channels are functionally useless is a sign of the rot in our country.
Email is teetering on the void. Chat is balkanized and siloed, same with social media, unlike telephony there is no source monopoly or tradition of cross standards.
Txt is the last bastion. It'll die in the next decade I'd guess.
It's a problem everywhere. This is what you get when you let the advertising industry operate unchecked. Scam calls and snail mail spam are just piggybacking on the fact that phone companies and postal services encourage and make money on telemarketing and mass marketing e-mails.
It's going to be hard to solve one without solving the other, as the difference between those scams and typical marketing communication is a matter of degree, not kind.
Here in Poland, the sticker that forbids advertisements does jack all. The post office might stop delivering spam, but most of the garbage in my mailbox comes from private individuals, hired by local companies, delivering the spam personally.
Call/SMS spam dropped somewhat thanks to GDPR, though I've experienced a uptick in the past few years, primarily driven by cryptocurrency scammers and fly-by-night companies selling photovoltaics. I do get an extra amount of phone spam, because I had a business and my phone number is listed in the business database.
Note that I do consider first-party (as in, from companies I have relationship with) cold calls as spam and scam too. Telcos in particular are notorious for scamming people - at this point, there is not much of a difference between scams discussed in this thread, and technically legal upsells and bullshitting done by my phone operator.
(They're not that better off-line, either. Only few weeks ago, a sales rep from a high-profile salon tried to scam my grandmother, by deceiving, manipulating, outright lying and using psychological pressure tactics, to get her to sign for a TV and Internet service she doesn't want or need. That happened physically, in the salon, when she went there to take over my late grandfader's phone contract.)
1. Reading a message is low-obligation compared to answering a phone or taking physical mail out of a box.
2. A shorter message has less room to both contain a scam and a cover story. Necessarily, either the payload or the cover story or both are thinner in an SMS message than a scam email.
3. But most importantly, social customs around text messages conversations are different from phone etiquette: besides being unauthenticated, caller-id came after decades of being expected to answer the phone without knowing who was calling or why.
A stranger sending a legitimate but unexpected text message feels obligated to explain WTF they're contacting you. "You don't know me, but..." Scammers, on the other hand, are trying to bypass this. "Oh, you know me."
Tying into point #2, a low-data channel like an SMS conversation is a high-context interaction. Have you ever gone back and read old SMS conversations and noticed a difference between the richness of your memory of the interaction and the sparseness of what the text actually said?
(Google search results pull the quote, "Generally, high-context cultures prefer oral communications, while low-context cultures favor written communications." My thesis is the telephone is a technology that turns oral communication into a low-context activity, and SMS is a technology that turned textual communication into a high-context activity. It's not impossible but more difficult for untargeted scams to go unnoticed in a high context channel.)
(It’s happened with a package delivery, as well as a washing machine installation. In the latter case it was Home Depot, when I finally got ahold of them they said it was my fault for not answering the phone and that I had to reschedule for 2 weeks out, meanwhile I didn’t have a working washing machine. I cancelled the order instead, went to Lowe’s and had a washer in a few hours.)
Mobile phones just don't offer it by default --- the best most have is a "Do not disturb" setting.
There is a marketing opportunity here for some software developer --- lots of people would actually *pay* for a mobile app that could effectively weed out auto-dialers and/or selectively send only unknown callers directly to voice mail without ringing the phone.
Or even simpler, put on his Beam-a-Thought helmet and sent a message back in time directly into the noggins of every delivery driver at the warehouse.
Victim blaming at its most absurd.
Or better yet, ask them to press a random number to connect the call --- before the phone will even ring or go to voice mail. This effectively weeds out most auto-dialers.
I have a Panasonic phone (connected to VOIP) that has this feature built in. It also has text to speech that reads the caller ID out loud. It's amazing how creative these hardware vendors have gotten now that their market is shrinking.
Mobile phones have some catching up to do.
Which at least I think is a grave mistake.
You might argue that you barely use the phone as a phone, and that might have been a good argument if there was anything remotely equivalent.
Many of them use voice filters to sound elderly, or to change genders. It seems like a lot of the scammers are getting frustrated, constantly trying to figure out if you're Kitboga, etc.
A vital service that is educating the public while providing rich entertainment.
The rise in the random texts (which end up pushing investment scams) also originates in off shore call centers in Southeast Asia.
Often times they get migrant workers with promises of jobs, but then take their passport and force them into years of repaying for their relocation fees.
> The trend is persisting, with total money lost by Americans in all internet/call centre-related frauds in the last 11 months having been estimated at $10.2 billion, an increase of 47% against last year’s $6.9 billion.
They mostly target the Chinese population, which in bc is quite large, and I'm assuming are ran from China. Each of the calls end with a "press 1 for English and 2 for Chinese". If you choose 1 the line hangs. If you choose 2 you get a Chinese person on the line. Sometimes the message is directly in Chinese and you need to guess the right key. I programmed some diatribe in Chinese in Google translate from my bookmarks toolbar.
Once in a while I get an Indian call center, mostly pretending to be Amazon with an order for an iPhone, which then veers into "someone stole your identity". If you reply with a younger voice, they hang. If I make an old person's voice, they stay with me. The more lost I sound, the harder the catch. I'm playing at keeping them on the line the longest time possible. It's fun cause they employ a few traps like asking for your birthdate then your age, or asking for some piece of information like your SIN a few times to validate you don't BS them. My backstory is getting better and better. It's kind of like beating a boss everytime you pass one.
Nowadays I'm excited when I receive one, because I get to play. But it's only a matter of time before my parents get trapped
Calls from my area code of residence are almost never spam, while calls from any other area code, and especially my phone's area code, are almost always spam.
I wonder if this is a rollout thing -- I had AT&T for years, and towards the end (about a year ago) I began receiving spam notices. But I was in one of their "primary" markets, so it's possible they rolled it out first here.
But it is great, when someone calls and i don't have them in my address book they show me the name of them, for example the name of the doctor offices, companies etc. As you can see in the demo carousel on their page, it shows "SMART" next to it, which emphazises that this isn't a number in your contacts but fetched from the internet.
Or if they are likely spam, my whole display is red and i can immediately hang up.
It can identify scammers' numbers (based on user reports). And the phone app will label the call as suspected spam.
There is also a setting to outright block incoming calls from numbers labeled as spammers.
Then there is call screening. The google bot will answer the call and ask questions that you select (like "who are you and why are you calling?"). You get a real time voice transcription of the answer so that you can decide to pick up if needed. But it's handy for spammers because they usually just hang up (or you get some half-transcripted text of a robocall message that was talking over the Google bot).
It doesn't solve the problem completely but it does help.
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/how-it-works-india-anti-spam-...
What about the victims?
But yes, I hope the perpetrators are brought to justice and the victims receive some kind of recompense.
“It may not be a national security concern yet,” is actually a fairly ominous statement from an FBI official of any kind.
This translate to "we even conceive going into war because of this".
> but the reputation (of a country) is involved
And this translated to "and economic sanctions are very likely".
So, don't think this is a bland statement.
Just a couple of things:
1. I don't think there's any official conspiracy by Indians in general to screw over Americans.
So kindly don't put out poorly thought out responses calling for blanket ban on Indians or things like that.
2. Indians themselves get scammed by these scammers.
That's all. Carry on.
I think it would be more effective if I learned a Hindi curse.
Anyways, I'm all for insulting a call center scammer, and a rude comment about their mom, especially comparing them to a dog or something, will probably piss them off. Then if they overreact back, threaten to email their boss the call recording.
When asked, just tell them your name is "Ben Chod". Gets em every time.
She Googled "Amazon support phone number" on her phone and the 2nd link had a 800 number but it was a site either legit or setup by scammers to review the phone number. She called it and figured someone was funny when they asked her to install an app on her phone.
Combined with how easy it is to get "support" from scammers instead of actual companies and high-pressure act-now tactics scammers use, and your wife was probably one of the few that caught on.
> Romance-related frauds and ‘tech support’ pop ups, originating largely from illegal call centres and phishing gangs in India, have caused losses of more than USD 3 billion... in the last two years alone. [1]
> Daud said the FBI’s website for reporting internet crimes (ic3.gov) have registered about 8.5 lakh complaints in 2021 with estimated losses of $6.9 billion, and over 7.8 lakh complaints in the 11 months of 2022, accounting for $10.2 billion in losses. The biggest losses are on account of investment ($3 billion), business email compromise ($2.4 billion), personal data breach ($1.2 billion), romance ($1 billion) and tech support ($781 million). [1]
[1] "Illegal Desi Call Centres Behind 10 billion loss to Americans in 2022", Times of India, Dec 27, 2022: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/illegal-desi-call-...
[2] "Elder Fraud Report 2021", FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center https://www.ic3.gov/Home/EF https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2021_IC3ElderFrau...
The Indian central government is a pretty small and unpowerful entity. Beyond securing the countries borders, and keeping the currency spinning, the government doesn't have the ability or power to do much more. They are not especially well funded (taxes are seen as especially unwelcome culturally) and staffed by tenured officials who cannot be fired and have no incentive to perform beyond the bare minimum. The relative unity and peace holding the country together is not the lousy government, but really more Indian culture sticking together.
Police are also seen as having some level of authority in the country, but realistically there's only 1 police for every 1,000 citizens (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/worldbusiness/03...) and the country is heavily heavily reliant on private security who are generally just villagers who are given a badge and rules to enforce.
Outside the big cities, government control is very limited. How else could the crop burning choking Delhi every winter continue?
So do these call centers operate with the blessing of the government? Probably not. Do they have to bribe police to operate? probably not. The government is probably unaware of scale of the problem, the police have their hands full taking care of their own people, and the American government wouldn't dare try a diplomatic solve as India's agreement with many foreign policy situations is mission critical.
Maybe it'd be better if in America we could try to get support off of the POTS and try to better connect to official brand sites or apps? Or we have phone plans/email plans for the elderly that don't allow stranger contact?
Extreme inequities rationalized by an abusive caste system, mixed with a culture that praises creative work avoidance.
- 2FA
- restaurants waitlist
That’s it. I just scrolled through a bunch of texts and calls and anything meaningful nowadays seem to come from whatsapp
If you want to contact me, message me on signal.
It's sad, but marketers and scammers have effectively ruined the idea of people reaching out to me on the phone. It's sad, but it is what it is.
Yes, they have the bad habit of scooping off your contact lists to index people without consent, and, on hindsight, is indeed an affront to telephone privacy, but its benefits outweigh those compromises enough.
I personally do not think reprimanding India will solve this. If somehow India stops this the void will be filled by scammers from some other country.
This calls for reforms in telecommunications systems / regulations / norms / protocols.
The fact that we haven't really seen anything near the level of Indian call centres tells me that this is unlikely.
I'm not saying that scammers don't exist in other countries, but that it's very rare to see anything with the level of sophistication and organisation that we see in India.
As if those would-be scammers in other countries presently don't scam.. because Indians do? How do Indians presently scamming stop would-be scammers in other countries from doing the same? That's nonsensical.
Face the facts, this is an India problem. Harsh economic sanctions against India are necessary to solve this problem, and if that fails, null routing India and the whole of South Asia if necessary. And if diplomacy fails, escalation to military strikes against Indian telecom infrastructure would be in order.
There is Call Screen in the native Android Phone app that does this, but even better: it can take the call on your behalf, and warn you based on what the other party says. It is available in the US, but it seems only for Pixel devices?
https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en&ref...
She left soon thereafter. By the way, they were ready to pay whatever she asked for (up to a reasonable limit of course). The tragedy is that people in countries like India need to survive, and values take the back seat.
Two more such companies offered her the same kind of job but she declined.
https://www.identityiq.com/scams-and-fraud/scammers-use-ai-g...
And the even more scary thing will be when they will be able to use a ChatGPT like AI to automate the whole thing in the future.
Like, what kind of dastardly evil people are constructing schools without permits in a country desperate trying to feed and education the large population?
Is the municipality head just upset they didn't get an under-the-table payment like usual?
Your concepts of building codes and property ownership are western. There's no such thing in India. Rather, there's a patchwork of policies that contradict each other and no consistent sense of which one has precedence. And land ownership is complicated by qualifications over who can sell it and claims from family members who maybe had a descendent there hundreds of years ago. And of course, various policies benefitting squatters. And whoever could forge the ownership papers nicely enough to claim it's theirs.
These things are all features and not bugs. It gives pathways for the government to dispose of any buildings that are annoying it for whatever reason. They find the law on the books that allows them to bulldoze the school the quickest, have the tractors out there within hours, and complete the process before any lawyer can get through the patchwork of laws to stop it.
> Like, what kind of dastardly evil people are constructing schools without permits in a country desperate trying to feed and education the large population?
Don't blame whomever built the school, they were trying to help! Blame the ones who tore it down.
What goes around comes around.
The victims of these crimes aren't in India. It makes sense that it would take external pressure to prioritize them.
The spice must flow
The coffers leaking doesn't matter when lobbyists fill them back up every night
A multi-factoral approach may be the best:
1. Sanction India to encourage the government to clean up it's police force and go after these scammers with prejudice. Not the call centers, the kingpins that run them.
2. Education. Run commercials on every TV stations, news stations, etc to educate people on this. Perhaps even including example calls. Run TV shows talking about the scammers and examples of them successfully bullying people into paying to build deep distrust of these people and allow people's pattern-matching brains to do the rest of the work.
3. Punishing call forwarding services for every scam call. Force them to implement deep KYC under threat of severe company-ending fines.
4. Find a way to "encourage" carriers to improve their services to terminate these calls before they even make it to the customer.
I get so many telemarketing and scam calls to my phone anymore I have to pay $100/year for a service to stop about 80% of them. This is unacceptable. I'm not alone, I would guess in a survey of the average American their cell phone is basically useless as a calling device these days.
yes
I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming. And given their criminal backgrounds, they are likely to do more harm than unintended good to the people around them. Remember Gandhi who once said, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".
The world is not a fair place. Morality doesn't get you fed, doesn't get you proper education or healthcare. And when you don't have proper opportunities to earn money the right way, it's tough not rationalizing scamming other people to get your basic needs fullfilled. Overall it's a good thought experiment to imagine what all we would have done if we were not born with our current privilege. I personally feel people are only as good as the world allows them to be.
You are right that people are only as good as the world allows them to be. Which brings us to morality. It is not about any greater good or anything like that. Morality is simply what the world has defined that allows people to be. Over time humanity has understood a set of ideas that allow a stable society to exist. Without these you will have a very dysfunctional society that is in a perpetual state of retaliation. The wise founders of nations have realized this and codified morals into law. There is no society today that exists without law because any such society would not have stood the test of time.
Ohohoho noo they're not. They are definitely not. Probably the one sitting at the top, but not the telecallers themselves who do the actual fieldwork. These are just poor youngsters who can't find jobs because of how ridiculously brutal India's labour market is.
Defrauding individual people out of their savings is bad, even if the victims live in an expensive country that's home to some very wealthy citizens (like the US), and the criminals live in a country that's home to some very poor citizens (like India). How could the existence of poverty in India make it moral for college educated Indian scammers who live lavishly on the stolen savings of Americans [0] (youtube has plenty of scammer channels that show scammers are mostly college educated Indians who never, ever give the money to the poor and malnourished)?