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Comment by frontman1988 | Hacker News Reader

frontman1988

Is it bad that I don't feel sorry for the Americans getting scammed given the obscene wealth inequality that exists between the two countries? Some wealth shifting to a poor country with millions of malnourished people might actually be a net positive to the world? Morality is complicated for sure.

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> Is it bad that I don't feel sorry for the Americans getting scammed

yes

Have you been to India and seen the absolute squalour and poverty that exists? I guess the net happiness in the world increases everytime some poor indian scams an american. The american is momentarily pissed off and wiser about scams, while the Indian has got a lot of money that will improve his living standards considerably.

Not every American is wealthy, and none of the Indian scammers are the Indians living in absolute poverty. Have a look at this scammer and his resume [0] and tell me how this college educated criminal defrauding Americans who aren't very tech savvy "increases the net happiness of the world"?

[0] https://youtu.be/EapyNrHp9xo?t=400

I don't think this is a complicated moral issue, and it takes some really sloppy thinking to see any ambiguity here.

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)?

[0] https://youtu.be/rfX8ZlBK0Uo?t=635

It's not bad, it's reprehensible. Notwithstanding the fact that there are about a dozen moral qualms about this line of thinking, the economic conditions of the countries have little bearing on the economic situations of individuals in this interaction.

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".

If only Gandhi's idealism was even somewhat practical. This is what he thought about the Jews: “Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

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.

Gandhi might've said a lot of things, but the point of that quote is that retaliation leads to an overall worse outcome. Unless you're an egomaniac, you will want to swallow your pride, break the chain of retaliation and live your life in peace. Retaliation is an inherently unstable state.

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.

> I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming

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.

Obviously, when we talk about scammers we are talking about the ring leaders.

I understand the impulse to feel this way, but redistributing wealth through criminal syndicates who likely contribute very little real value to the Indian economy is not the way to go.

In these types of call centers, nobody is malnourished. The people making the calls are probably making a pretty meager salary (let's say $300 a month) and the singular company owner takes in all profits, and spends it on BMWs, his 10 pieces of land, and his 20 other unrelated business ventures.

These scam call centers aren't owned by glorious socialist warriors, they're owned by comparatively wealthy individuals that pay their workers far less than the profit of their labor and often hold them under terrible working conditions. Also, yes feeling bad for old people losing their life savings is the correct position (america doesn't exactly accommodate for people without money).

How much do you make per year?

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