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Comment by marze | Hacker News Reader

Rather than "caused by illegal Indian call centres in 2022", wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Indian industrial-scale criminal scam operations"?

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Operating in collusion with American carriers who don't try to identify and block these operations because they get paid on a per-call basis?

Is that the case?

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.

We handled this in the days of email spam by blacklisting providers that refused to police their customers.

What would happen if the American companies just started playing hardball? For example, what if they required that contracts with foreign telephone companies had a fee based on scams detected as coming through and just refused to work with any company that wouldn't agree to those terms? I have no idea if that exact idea would make sense or even be possible to implement, but my thinking is that in many cases the American companies might be able to afford to lose the business more than their international partners, so playing a game of chicken might be worthwhile. In other words, just because American telecoms might not be able to do anything from a technical perspective doesn't mean that they don't have social or business pressure they could apply if they actually wanted to solve the problem. Ultimately, it seems like the American companies haven't done anything because they don't really have any business incentive to; as long as they aren't held culpable legally and don't lose sales due to the PR hit, trying to use their influence to solve this is purely a risk from a financial perspective.

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.

The form of hardball (that I'm aware of) would be blacklisting providers, which means good faith people get blocked along with bad faith people. That'd limit a lot of people from the US communicating back to India. It would be possible to block inbound but not outbound calls though, I believe.

In that case the good faith people can move to a different provider and the problem will self segregate out.

Pretty much everyone who communicates overseas use apps now because they’re free.

The FCC has ordered American phone companies to drop traffic from known spam conduit phone companies. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-global-uc-robocall-m... Hopefully this will tighten the noose and make robocall traffic radioactive.

I may be too cynical, but I can't help but assume that none of them will actually follow through with this unless/until someone gets actually sanctioned for not doing this in a significant way (i.e. something that costs them more than they make from not doing so).

I suppose it's not that easy. They can use international VOIP providers to route their calls, maybe even run their own, rotating the numbers they use and disguising the actual origin. If that wouldn't work you could probably hire people in other countries to put some agent software on something like a smart phone and use these.

It is that easy. Regardless of what convoluted setup they're using, at some point those calls need to get to the US-based carrier. That is where they can be blocked. The carrier can simply say "we'll stop peering with you if more than 10% of your calls are spam" and the upstream carriers will have to clean up their act (better screen their customers or implement similar terms) or be cut off from being able to reach the US.

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?

The problem is bad enough that a us customer might pay extra to not receive those calls. So maybe the phone company can profit off of a service to solve the problem.

That works until you land in a situation where the calls are coming from a carrier who can't (or won't) do enough about it, but the carrier has enough legitimate traffic that it will annoy many of your customers to just shut them out. Remember: All the actual companies or carriers you can identify have nothing to do with the actual scammers. They are intermediaries and the scammers will hide between legitimate calls in one way or other.

You can call Indian industrial-scale criminal scam operations strategic centers deployed against US , if that helps victims get back their money and justice.

AND

de facto sanctioned by India and USA by not enforcing the law and busting the scammers

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