The problem is these scams are cheap to run and the risk is very low for the people running them. The police rarely do anything except a token show to arrest a few call centers full of low-level scammers. Rarely are the kingpins ever arrested and as such they just pop new centers up as often as they go down.

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.