Problem is the ring leaders of the scam call centres that actually finance the operations and move the stolen funds are usually not Indian residents. Once one call center is busted, they move to recruit another. The employees themselves aren't blameless either and need to be caught but the problem will simply rotate between countries if the brains are not caught. The reason there are so many scam call centres are there in India is the same reason there are so many customer support call centres: cheap English speaking labour.
Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
101–110 of 504 posts
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
While maybe an act of war is too harsh, we should be hitting them hard economically.
The police in India are paid off to allow this. Indeed, the best solution would be economic sanctions on India until it is resolved.
I don't support any kinda scam to begin with but what should other countries do to USA for exporting MLMs, ponzi scheme, crypto scams and other trash
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#103A lot is caused by the forwarding services that mask the numbers. Really each should be held liable for any damages.
The calls is one aspect, how they get money out is another. The gift card business needs some revamping. It should not be so easy to transfer billions every year with no accountability.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just accept the collateral damage of never answering calls. Traditional telephone service is dead to anyone under 40.
Anyone under 40, who have no kids, don’t run a business, have no presence in the community, and socialize only with people under 40.
Potentially a significant proportion of the population
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#105These days whenever I hear Indian voice, I just reject call. They way they target grandparents is surreal. One day they told my my friends parents that their children is in accident and they have to pay in gift cards. It is so distressing to elderly people. US must take strict actions and call out India publicly. Elderly people are weak, education isn't going to solve the scam problem. Scammers must be punished harsl…
Telco's could put a stop to this if they really wanted to. Start with disabling number spoofing for international calls, if the number presented isn't in the country of origin then reject the connection request. Another choke point is the gift card system.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#106[flagged]
My understanding is that most of these scams use spoofed numbers (or legitimate forwarding numbers), so there's no "just ignore it" remediation. SHAKEN/STIR[1] is meant to address this kind of spoofing, but it's not a stretch to imagine that these kinds of scams mostly target older people who are less likely to have (or understand) Caller ID anyways. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
Yeah, they spoof local numbers. I haven't lived in the city my area code is from in a long time. Occasionally I'll answer calls from there when I'm bored and it's always a scammer.
What's even more disturbing is that I'm now getting calls from people talking in Hindi. I answer in English but they ask me to switch to Hindi. (I'm from Pakistan and speak Urdu which is mutually intelligible with Hindi). I'm guessing it's to build familiarity/trust.
They want to pay off my phone, electric and other bills and in return I pay them 50% of the amount. I give them fake info and try to keep them on as long as possible... asking them to repeat multiple times. Sometimes I'll tell how thankful I am that they came to me with this 50% off offer because I'm facing financial troubles. Not once did any of them fell bad about trying to scam a poor person. Their response is usually something like "This is exactly why we are offering this service, to help people like you".
Eventually they get frustrated and hangup. This way I can hurt their ROI just a bit.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
While maybe an act of war is too harsh, we should be hitting them hard economically.
The police in India are paid off to allow this. Indeed, the best solution would be economic sanctions on India until it is resolved.
That sounds an attack on the people of India for something a private company is doing. I also don't think the US has jurisdiction there, so I'd much rather see an investment in education or public infrastructure to help with it.
If this was similar to the Russia stuff where the goal was to affect the election and was sponsored by the govt then sanctions kinda make sense, but this is a problem of international communication between private citizens. If we wanted to make some law for this that seems cool but it'd need to be done at the UN, not in the US
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#108Set your phone to silence unknown callers. Completely eliminated the issue for me, along with any other random goofball trying to call me.
Also caused me to completely miss an appliance delivery because the driver called me from his personal cell, I forgot I had "unknown callers" filtered, and he gave up when he couldn't reach me. Even though I get way more spam calls than legitimate calls, I realized that fully half of the legitimate calls I get are from numbers not in my contacts: delivery drivers, doctors offices, restaurants confirming reservations,…
Same problem with physical mail in the U.S. 99% of physical mail I get is commercial garbage, but I still have to sift through them since I don’t want to miss the remaining 1% from IRS.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#109It's mind-boggling that the United States allows this kind of thing to happen. In the EU I get maybe one spam call every couple of months. From the stories you hear from Americans on HN, Americans get multiple spam/scam calls a day, and the vast majority of their inbound calls are spam/scams. What is going wrong in the US that isn't going wrong in the EU? Language barrier? Regulatory capture?
Certainly most of my inbound calls in Ireland are scam calls. Not sure this is solved EU-wide, maybe just in your specific EU country?
As far as I know the solution is to require more anti-spoofing techniques (e.g. SHAKEN/STIR) for caller ID and then cut off the carriers who don't provide that, plus the carrier providing the numbers enforcing stronger terms on their users.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#110These days whenever I hear Indian voice, I just reject call. They way they target grandparents is surreal. One day they told my my friends parents that their children is in accident and they have to pay in gift cards. It is so distressing to elderly people. US must take strict actions and call out India publicly. Elderly people are weak, education isn't going to solve the scam problem. Scammers must be punished harsl…
I had to instruct my elderly father to do the same -- any kind of accent and he hangs up. He got scammed by one of these people in 2018 or so -- he gave the person his debit card number over the phone to remove malware on his computer while I was out on a super-long run. Luckily he couldn't remember his PIN, and his bank was great at blocking the charge. There's a special place in hell for these animals who prey on old people.