No they can't. The scammers will just hire a random person from indeed/monster/whatever, ship them a SIM box and tell them to fill it with prepaids.
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.
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.
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.
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.