Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report

SMS has hung on for three reasons:

1. Reading a message is low-obligation compared to answering a phone or taking physical mail out of a box.

2. A shorter message has less room to both contain a scam and a cover story. Necessarily, either the payload or the cover story or both are thinner in an SMS message than a scam email.

3. But most importantly, social customs around text messages conversations are different from phone etiquette: besides being unauthenticated, caller-id came after decades of being expected to answer the phone without knowing who was calling or why.

A stranger sending a legitimate but unexpected text message feels obligated to explain WTF they're contacting you. "You don't know me, but..." Scammers, on the other hand, are trying to bypass this. "Oh, you know me."

Tying into point #2, a low-data channel like an SMS conversation is a high-context interaction. Have you ever gone back and read old SMS conversations and noticed a difference between the richness of your memory of the interaction and the sparseness of what the text actually said?

(Google search results pull the quote, "Generally, high-context cultures prefer oral communications, while low-context cultures favor written communications." My thesis is the telephone is a technology that turns oral communication into a low-context activity, and SMS is a technology that turned textual communication into a high-context activity. It's not impossible but more difficult for untargeted scams to go unnoticed in a high context channel.)

Well. The UK is not immune to spam calls. Here is a YouTube video of hacker going after a call centre that was targeting the UK. They were making millions of dollars per year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyEoOfSECp0

Indian knows english. It's hard to target non-english speakers.

Same reason the U.S. allows all other sorts of privacy invasion like the White-Pages-like search sites that will gladly share ( for free ) your past 11 something U.S. mailing addresses you've resided at, the names, ages & addresses of your family members & a whole host of other information ( you may have to pay for this bit ). All you need is someone's First & Last name. Even the U.S. state is not really needed.

The reason being someone is reaping massive benefits from whatever loophole allows for this kind of data collection & is shoring up initiatives so that loophole isn't plugged.

Now try the same search with a U.K. resident or E.U. resident you know of. I'd say you will have a markedly tougher time gaining access to similar information, with just a few clicks & without ever pulling out your credit card. I have no clue if U.K. is similarly compromised off late but a few years ago ( prior to Brexit ) it was not the case.

There's no reason consumer SIMs should be able to call more than N distinct numbers in any 24h period. You can implement reasonable rate limits to prevent abuse.

However, even if we assume that SIM boxes are a magic solution to carrier interventions, that still raises the cost from the current status-quo. Implement enough of these barriers and the entire scam operation becomes unprofitable and no longer worthwhile.

I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely already have everything they need to largely put a stop to it but they knowingly ignore it. It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing. It's expensive to run outbound campaigns in almost any other country, and very cheap in the US (fractions of a penny per minute compared to 5-10c per minute in some EU locations). Scammers need volume to make money.

The reason carriers -- from the local exchange carriers and up -- ignore it is because just a single scam operation can mean 10s of thousands of dollars in volume a month, and sometimes more. Since they have to self-report for the most part they're not very incentivized to stop it. There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it, but carriers push back hard on those regulations and they never stick.

I know from experience dealing with this that it's absolutely not ignorance that's at play on the regulatory and commercial side. It's disgusting, and as fueled with greed and red tape as you'd fear.