I always wait on the line until I get an actual person and then I give them a satisfyingly long raspberry.
I think it would be more effective if I learned a Hindi curse.
Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
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Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#32Set 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,…
There is a solution for this and it's called SMS
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#33To temper the potential for anti-indian rhetoric, US authorities work side by side with local Indian authorities to shut these down. Mark Rober has a few videos dedicated to going after several of these scam call centers, and most recently 3 major ones were shut down and their owners arrested.
Mark Rober also gets support from the LA police while they do not care about normal peoples theft.
Resource constraints are a problem across all industries.
My recollection wrt Rober was the police aided him to help drive awareness.
For the “normal peoples theft” what would you like to police to do?
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#34Set 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,…
I just accept the collateral damage of never answering calls. Traditional telephone service is dead to anyone under 40.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#35[flagged]
While maybe an act of war is too harsh, we should be hitting them hard economically.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#36I find that a majority of our incoming calls are scams. Surprised that Google/Apple haven’t fixed this at the behest of the government.
Google does have a bunch of features for screening spam calls.
It can identify scammers' numbers (based on user reports). And the phone app will label the call as suspected spam.
There is also a setting to outright block incoming calls from numbers labeled as spammers.
Then there is call screening. The google bot will answer the call and ask questions that you select (like "who are you and why are you calling?"). You get a real time voice transcription of the answer so that you can decide to pick up if needed. But it's handy for spammers because they usually just hang up (or you get some half-transcripted text of a robocall message that was talking over the Google bot).
It doesn't solve the problem completely but it does help.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#37Set 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,…
It's a delivery. Couldn't he have knocked on your door?
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#38Rather than "caused by illegal Indian call centres in 2022", wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Indian industrial-scale criminal scam operations"?
Operating in collusion with American carriers who don't try to identify and block these operations because they get paid on a per-call basis?
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no meaningful blocking here: the victimizing party is spoofing, or using a "legitimate" forwarding service. Carriers could just cut India off entirely, but (1) money finds a way, and (2) we're going to cut off service for a democratic country of over a billion people because of a few scammers? The remediation here needs to be statutory: (1) anti-spoofing needs to happen at the carrier level and not just the t…
$10 Billion is not just a few scammers. That is an unfathomably huge industry.
I can certainly fathom $10 billion. But I take your point; my point was that, even if there are a million criminals involved in telephone fraud in India, it's a tiny fraction of overall (and primarily legitimate!) telephone traffic. Interfering with over a billion peoples' ability to talk with their loved ones requires existential damage to our country, not frustrating crime that's best resolved with international cooperation.
Edit: I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft: nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn't somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don't see the same kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet.
[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#40Set 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,…
There must be a technological solution to this problem ...