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Comment by floomk | Hacker News Reader

Telemarketing basically isn't a thing in my country. The only reason it's so widespread in the US is a failure to regulate it.

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I lived in Europe and these calls were non-existent too. But I spoke Flemish (which is a dialect of Dutch). So the target area was VERY small.

But my friend living in the South of Belgium, who spoke French, got plenty more.

If a scammer employs Flemish / Dutch speaking people they'll have a small target audience.

For Dutch you're looking at 25 million potential L1 targets [1].

However do that for French and all of the sudden you have about 80 million L1 potential targets [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language

Just as you, I live in Flanders. I get calls in English, French, even Spanish. Sometimes even in Dutch. In my experience, the English and Dutch speakers hate French, while the French and Spanish speakers hate Dutch. So you choose whatever they hate most and start asking about their favorite brand of toothpicks or whatever untill they fold. Double the fun when they find someone else speaking your language, at which point you switch to another language. Or go to pig latin.

Germany, so decently big market. For a short time (a few months after the FB leak which included my phone number), I’d get those robot (literally, old-school automated messages) scam calls from "Interpol" about needing my passport. That lasted for a few weeks, maybe 8 or so calls. No scam calls before that, none since. The number has been the same since about 2002 when I got my first phone.

I always assume that failure to regulate something, when coming from an entity with essentially unlimited power such as a government, is simply done on purpose.

Hey! Be thankful for the American government, it's the best that money can buy. /s

+1 for the irony, but I was meaning broadly. I'm on the other side of the planet, and still find astonishing how those things work in similar ways across the globe.

Americans are always working overtime to gimp the government in some meaningful areas and give it ultimate power in others.

When I lived in Australia these were quite a nuisance. Companies would sell your data as there was basically no real data protection. I don't know if it had changed since. The calls would typically come in waves. I would deal with it by letting the callers know how I felt about them and their job. Some would argue with me saying they bought my number fair and square.

What country is that?

I think in the EU you're only allowed to call someone who you already have a customer relationship with.

Most of these phone scammers are in India, so two observations: they don't care about local laws, and they're far more likely to speak English than French or German. It makes sense for them to target a very large population of wealthy English speakers, e.g. Americans.

Yeah, they could call a German and try to scam them in English, but that's probably less likely to work than scamming somebody in their native language.

The systems that let them spoof numbers appears to be uniquely American.

I’m in Australia and get calls and messages from spoofed numbers all the time. The Wikipedia page on Caller ID spoofing is quite informative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

I think it’s much more common in English speaking countries because collectively they’re the most attractive target with 450m+ wealthy consumers.

No one would answer calls from an Indian phone number and it would be incredibly expensive. This is relevant because number spoofing is blocked by the telcos in the EU.

What's funny is that Americans can very quickly distinguish an Indian accent. So any time I answer the phone and hear an unexpected caller with an unknown voice and an Indian accent calling himself "Kevin" I know it's a scammer immediately and I hang up.

You must not be applying for tech jobs....

That's essentially the law in America too. For the last 20 years or so, we've had the "Do Not Call List" and if you add your number to it, you don't get these calls.

Unfortunately that law only works for land lines. Cell phone spam was virtually unknown 20 years ago because cellular minutes were not free, and anybody who wasted your time on a cell call could be sued for costing you money. Also back in those days there were no comprehensive databases mapping people to mobile numbers. Finally there didn't exist easy ways of spoofing your caller ID number so if you spammed someone you would likely be caught.

That's all different now, which is why the old law needs to be updated for mobile phones.

In Belgium, that's not the case for phone calls. You can't email or fax someone without their prior permission, but you can call them, as long as they're not on the do-not-call-list.

Of course, that list is dead in the water. It has to be _bought_ by companies trying to call people and no effort is being done to make the existence of the list known to the public.

"Surprisingly", the board of the non-profit managing the list consists of representatives from call-centers, marketing associations and telco's.

(I had a major run-in with them once, because their previous website allowed adding phone numbers to the do-not-call-list without verification. So I tried adding all of Belgium's phone numbers with a script).

Not the commenter but in Sweden I get almost zero unwanted calls. The only ones I do get are from services I have or that I've previously had.

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