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RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

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Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#21

Post by cstejerean »

dvtrn wrote: post #15
reaperducer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until about a month ago, I used to get 2-3 a day on my work phone. I gave up answering, and there's about 200 voicemails in there in a language I don't speak.

3 a day? Last week I got six in the span of 93 MINUTES. They all matched the area code and prefix of my number but the last four were always different. Block one another calls 12 minutes later. I’ve had this number for 13 years, have ported it across carriers and it’s long been known by friends and family as the default way to find me. This problem was a mild nuisance years ago. It’s a plague now. It may be time to f…

I block just about every number from the area code my phone number is in. I haven’t lived there in that area for a long time and 100% of the calls were spam. One day the spammers will wise up and use the area code where I live rather than where my phone is based but so far Number Shield has worked out great for blocking entire prefixes.

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#22

Post by duxup »

Huhty wrote: post #5

I get 2-3 calls like these every week. It's getting really bad.

I bought a secondary phone (for the house, kids), and within 10 minutes of activating it ... spam calls.

For more than a year wife had calls from both the IRS and FBI, and some unknown lawsuit threatening to come after her.

We must be really good at hiding because the FBI never found us and just gave up calling!

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#23

Post by fellellor »

kerkeslager wrote: post #13
mysterypie wrote: post #7

How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be as small as 2 or 10 cents per call to make these operations unprofitable. I'm sure that the telecom operators in the foreign country could easily track down (or already know precisely where to find) the call centers. Once the fraud falls below a threshold the…

It may be a surprise to the HN "incentives are the only way to do anything" crowd, but there simply is not an incentive structure that will fix this problem, because nobody knows where the calls are coming from. Not the US, not the telcos, not the countries the calls are coming from, nobody . You can place the tariff on countries, and then the countries just have to accept the tariff because there's not a damn thing…

It’s not right, that a sensible comment like yours is being downvoted. Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal. And Indian law enforcement is certainly behind the western world in that regard.

Besides, it’s not like these scammers are paying taxes to the Indian government, so they don’t have any national incentive to facilitate scammers. Tax compliance in countries like India, outside the first world, is very poor. Though the article mentions that Indian authorities are cooperating with Canadian officials, it needs to be understood that this cooperation isn’t based on any incentive structure, other than civilised societies need to crack down on crime. Crime in Canada is a low priority for Indian officials, just like I’m sure it’s the other way around.

Finally, Canada doesn’t even feature in the top 15-20 trading partners for India, last time I checked, so I don’t know what punitive incentive can be hoped for here. If you need a solution, it would be more productive to approach from a more pragmatic, cooperative point of view, rather than being all high and mighty and taking a carpet bombing style approach that affects legitimate business as well. Or, you could do that but it wouldn’t even matter.

Edit: I’d like to add that every day there is news about people, here in India also losing their life savings to these scammers. So it would be wrong to have an impression that authorities and citizens of this country take pleasure in people from richer countries being scammed. I’ve old, not so tech savvy parents myself, who I realise are pretty vulnerable to this evil.

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#24

Post by gregmac »

mysterypie wrote: post #7

How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be as small as 2 or 10 cents per call to make these operations unprofitable. I'm sure that the telecom operators in the foreign country could easily track down (or already know precisely where to find) the call centers. Once the fraud falls below a threshold the…

My understand use these call centers use VoIP providers in the country though. The traffic crossing the border is likely just an encrypted stream, indistinguishable from some VPN or other generic service.

The VoIP providers are getting paid (by the scammers), your cell/phone company is getting paid twice (by both you and the VoIP provider). It's not like customers are switching to the other spam-less phone option, or giving up having voice service entirely.

I hate to be cynical about it, but literally all the players in a position to track and shut these calls down via technical means have absolutely no tangible incentives to do so.

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#25

Post by Aperocky »

mysterypie wrote: post #7

How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be as small as 2 or 10 cents per call to make these operations unprofitable. I'm sure that the telecom operators in the foreign country could easily track down (or already know precisely where to find) the call centers. Once the fraud falls below a threshold the…

Things coming over lines no longer have a country. How do you determine which call are international? All of them are local and operated by foreign call center over the internet. They can easily acquire a VPN and the internet traffic will be local as well. How do you even track all that internet traffic? Are you prepared to give all your secret to government to track these things?

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#26

Post by catalogia »

unishark wrote: post #20
catalogia wrote: post #3

> ""We have disrupted the necessary flow of money from Canada to India, which will have a big impact on the operation and bottom line of scammers," Ogden said Friday, in announcing the charges." Perhaps so, but to what extent and for how long? How many other mules are there, and how long will it take them to find replacement mules to replace those arrested? I hope they throw the book at the mules, but I don't expect…

It seems like a small story about a small bust, but if you keep reading the story keeps going. They are directly going after the scammers too. > "Police have since worked with Indian authorities to carry out a flurry of raids against suspected illegal call centres in the country. Canadian officials said Friday they know of 39 call centres, in the New Delhi and Noida area, that have been shut down. "Ogden said still o…

Yeah, but is 39 call centers a lot, or just the tip of the iceberg? It wouldn't really surprise me if there were hundreds of these companies, but I don't know.

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#27

Post by tonyarkles »

smnrchrds wrote: post #17
treve wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone system seems pretty absurd. Just the fact that we can't trust originating phone numbers seems odd. There's lots of good ideas to go around, and there's so much in internet technology that could be applied to the phone system, but I'd love to read an article on why its hard to update the phone system.

Take the difficulties of IPv6 migration and remove the ticking clock of running out of IPv4 addresses. How long would the migration take? 10 years? 10000 years? I bet it would be closer to the latter than the former.

And add in the fact that Nortel made a ton of the currently deployed phone switch gear, and they haven’t existed for almost 20 years now.

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#28

Post by peteretep »

fellellor wrote: post #23
kerkeslager wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a surprise to the HN "incentives are the only way to do anything" crowd, but there simply is not an incentive structure that will fix this problem, because nobody knows where the calls are coming from. Not the US, not the telcos, not the countries the calls are coming from, nobody . You can place the tariff on countries, and then the countries just have to accept the tariff because there's not a damn thing…

It’s not right, that a sensible comment like yours is being downvoted. Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal. And Indian law enforcement is certainly behind the western world in that regard. Besides, it’s not like these scammers are paying taxes to the Indian government, so they don’t have any national incentive to facilitate scammers. Tax compliance in coun…

> Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal

Mmm, but some Canadian or American legal entity is bridging these onto the phone network, and needs to be doing its due diligence better.

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#29

Post by dade_ »

treve wrote: post #10
mysterypie wrote: post #7

How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be as small as 2 or 10 cents per call to make these operations unprofitable. I'm sure that the telecom operators in the foreign country could easily track down (or already know precisely where to find) the call centers. Once the fraud falls below a threshold the…

The phone system seems pretty absurd. Just the fact that we can't trust originating phone numbers seems odd. There's lots of good ideas to go around, and there's so much in internet technology that could be applied to the phone system, but I'd love to read an article on why its hard to update the phone system.

There are many reasons:

-You forward your office phone to your cell phone. You want the number of the original person calling to show up on your cell phone. This means that the office phone system needs to spoof the original caller's phone number. This could be a local call, an overseas call, etc.

This is not a simple update issue. How does the telco know that this is a legitimate spoof? Further, if this is blocked and the number is rewritten to the billing telephone number, the client will complain that they are answering outside calls, thinking it is their office calling.

-How the carriers are integrated, how do they trust the incoming call info from another carrier? Blacklists and whitelists are impossible to keep up as scammers are randomizing the data.

This is an expensive problem, and one that carriers would love to solve - there isn't a lack of incentive either. I've seen a few solutions out there, but I am not convinced they work as advertised.

Re: RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India

#30

Post by unishark »

catalogia wrote: post #26
unishark wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a small story about a small bust, but if you keep reading the story keeps going. They are directly going after the scammers too. > "Police have since worked with Indian authorities to carry out a flurry of raids against suspected illegal call centres in the country. Canadian officials said Friday they know of 39 call centres, in the New Delhi and Noida area, that have been shut down. "Ogden said still o…

Yeah, but is 39 call centers a lot, or just the tip of the iceberg? It wouldn't really surprise me if there were hundreds of these companies, but I don't know.

Probably hundreds of them at least. But there may be only a smaller fraction of them targeting Canada.
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