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Comment by CrendKing | Hacker News Reader

You do understand India is a country with huge number of scammers who targets US people, and they are causing US billions of dollars of damage [1] each year? Sure, you might not be a criminal, but how would these companies know? Plus, since you mention "gift card", you do know that scammers use gift cards to launder money, right?

India doesn't put heavy hammer on scammers for various reasons. For example, since the scammers are mostly targeting foreign countries, and Indian police are well known for accepting bribes from these scammers, the scamming business is de-facto welcomed. They are too short-sighted to not see that the "industry" is damaging India's global reputation, which transitively affects you in negative way. It's unfortunate, and hope the situation improves over the time.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/02/...

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Your comment takes an (unfair IMO) position that it somehow matters what country the OP was in. It's not like the auth systems are designed for higher scrutiny in specific countries. There is more than one way to confirm identity, but somehow BigTech and Co keep assuming a happy path environment for you.

Case in point: my US bank insists on sending an OTP to my US number (and US number alone) for any transaction, making it impossible for me to move money when abroad. The problem exists in the other direction too, my foreign account only allows verification thru one mechanism. It's really frustrating.

>It's not like the auth systems are designed for higher scrutiny in specific countries

Of course it matters and of course they are.

Everything you describe and OP describes are frictions that apply by virtue of you not being in the US, on purpose.

I worked in the payment card industry for awhile a few years back. There are entire countries that are blocked by card providers due to fraud.

Unfair or not, it actually makes a difference. I was in a neat position to see some of the attempts in real time. It blew me away how much attempted fraud there is. Think of it like spam email - it's that bad.

I was the operator of a webserver for a small B2B shop for a number of years. We only had a couple dozen local customers, we hand-delivered custom orders with a dedicated truck. If you weren't local, there was nothing on that website that would have mattered to you.

But there were on the order of 50x more attempts from bots trying to log into our Wordpress instance from India (all illegitimate) than from actual customers. It was ridiculous.

Similar situation for a local small business I’ve worked for. Typically I’d respond to contact form spam with a notice to the source network. US-registered networks tended to reliably address the problem while IN- just ignored me, if their contact information worked at all.

> sending an OTP to my US number (and US number alone) for any transaction, making it impossible for me to move money when abroad

Strictly speaking it doesn't make it impossible. You have made a choice not to pay roaming fees while using your USA number while abroad.

Nope. I travel to EU often with roaming on. OTP SMSs for many services don't come through. It's a real pain.

Very strange. How about regular SMS? Are they dropped too? I had zero issues with TMo, and I don't even need roaming for this.

It's weird, regular SMSs do come through, as far as I know. It's hard to tell as I don't get many SMSs, mostly iMessage and Whatsapp. I'm on AT&T, and something about automated messages from those 5-6 digit numbers never show up when you want them to.

SMS on roaming can be a hit or miss. I travel internationally every year and I am always worried that some SMSs wont reach and it happens from time to time. I especially hate those product/services that only do SMS based 2FA.

Just FYI (because your OTP hell was my OTP hell until recently) if you fly to another country, disable roaming in the phone, and don’t make outbound calls, your phone will receive these OTP messages for free with most US cell providers.

> huge number of scammers who targets US people

Scammers, as a category, target everyone. You think Indians don't get conned into sharing their OTP/passwords or financial details?

> They are too short-sighted to not see that the "industry" is damaging India's global reputation

India has one of the lowest police officers to population ratios in the world. They are so swamped with day-to-day crimes and other nonsense and providing protection to events and politicians that India's "global reputation" is simply not on their radar.

You cannot buy a SIM for your phone or open a bank account without providing ten types of identity documents but these scammers seem to have an infinite supply of phone numbers and bank accounts. That is just the way things are.

> Scammers, as a category, target everyone. You think Indians don't get conned into sharing their OTP/passwords or financial details?

Right, but it's a lens thing. US merchants don't care that they're also targeting non-Americans. They care about "target US people" as a subset of that.

Laundering money using 100-200$ gift cards?

Absolutely. Walmart used to have a policy of refunding gift cards in cash. You'd buy many at one location, and return them at another. Less trackable. Gift cards are also used quite regularly in human/sex trafficking to control the victims.

A few years ago, gift cards are THE currency in scamming world for shifting funds between victim and money launderer. They would ask victim to go to 8 different department stores to buy as many gift cards as the store allows then tell them the card number. It's pretty normal the victim hands them over 20 $200 gift cards. And the scammers will keep phishing the victim over and over again until there is no more money to squeeze.

Nowadays many scammers switch to digital concurrency like Bitcoin, which is even less traceable and hard to shut down, but that's only because banks and stores have put in the counter-measurements you encounter to combat them.

There are many scamming related materials available online. Many scam-baiters put their video on Youtube, such as Jim Browning [1] and Kitboga [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@JimBrowning

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@KitbogaShow

Your comments are ill-informed as several remote terminal providers have joined with scam-baiters and India police to combat this...new as in the effort started in Jan2023.

You need to update your information and knowledge

Just because there are efforts to combat the problem to some degree does not mean the problem is solved or that there isn't a major problem to begin with.

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