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Comment by infoseek12 | Hacker News Reader

India has 1.4 billion people, of course some of them are black hats for hire. Perhaps India is a hotbed of cybercrime but this article is mostly anecdotes and nothing in it is evidence that the nation’s at all comparable to other hotspots of hirable hackers like Eastern Europe or Israel.

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India already have the reputation for their "IT support departments" calling everyone in the world every few months to try to gain access to their computer, also known as social engineering, a form of hacking. Many of their operation centers have been exposed, yet the Indian government has not been able to stop it. China also has 1.4 billion people, and they indeed are more known than India for being a serious black hat threat. But if you ask the average person what kind of hacker they are more familiar with, they will probably recall the 10+ times they were personally called by a hacker with a strong Indian accent.

India has ~150 million English speakers, while China has ~10 million.

It’s worrisome that many companies out source their IT there …

That's slowing down; Mexico City and the Philippines are becoming more popular.

PI because of long standing ties to the US and Canada, and eligbility for things like TFW workers in Canada. Mexico City for timezones and NAFTA TN visas.

> That's slowing down;

That's not what the IT export numbers say.

I always thought they were scammers, never have I heard them to refer to as hackers except in this thread.

Social engineering counts as hacking, even if it doesn't require much specialized technical finesse.

You can be both

The reputation you describe is non existant in my (non-English-speaking) country. I guess US and UK are just the easiest and richest targets for Indian hackers. Why should we expect something else ?

It's the language barrier. Germany is targeted by Turks and Eastern Europeans in similar fashion.

I think you severely overestimate German speakership in Turkey.

I think the point was more that there are fewer German speakers in India than English speakers, by a large margin, so if you are going to scam in German you might be more likely to source your call-centre operatives from elsewhere, which is why Indian call centres don't have the reputation in that country which they do in the UK & US.

Some of them might be former residents of Germany. Most of my spam calls came from Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey or Bulgaria, most of the spoken German was pretty decent. Good old times when I had time for scambaiting.

Good thing that this only affects English speaking countries.

It made me really allergic for the word kindly combine with Sir

Sir , kindly xxxxxx = Indian scammer

The fact that general English language proficiency is far greater in India (where English is an official language) than China ... may have something to do with this.

Boiler-room telephony operations tend to follow linguistic capabilities. The Philippines is another locale with widespread English-language capabilities and a low prevailing wage rate, though it seems less associated with technical scams than India is.

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