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

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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

#301

Post by bbbbb5 »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #235
bbbbb5 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a single example of similar fraud being successfully tackled? Not just the scammers being caught, but the entire scam being rendered unprofitable. European authorities haven't managed to do anything about the car selling scams Romanians have been running for decades now. Nobody has managed to do anything about the Nigerian prince scams. BEC with truly shitty phishing pages keeps on growing and growing. T…

If we can make it harder to run a scam call business by changing things on our end, and these changes do not impede non-fraudulent use, why not go for it? I don’t see why you’re pushing so hard against this line of reasoning, I guess. You’re making it sound like a hopeless endeavor to even try, in a “don’t lock your doors because thieves will just use lock picks” kind of way.

> If we can make it harder to run a scam call business by changing things on our end

How much harder? If your changes increase the telephony costs of a scam call centre from 0.001% of revenue to 0.002%, you have not actually made their operations harder.

> and these changes do not impede non-fraudulent use, why not go for it?

Because these changes would not be free.

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

#302

Post by probably_wrong »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #144
CoastalCoder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for that to be meaningful, there would need to be some mechanism to prevent fly-by-night operations formed to isolate the liability. Maybe requiring them to post a large bond (proportional to the liability) and/or have insurance?

Could someone explain why the reply from @calimac was killed? I'm guessing it has something to do with the snowshoe-spamming reference, but I'm totally in the dark.

The user is probably blacklisted due to bad past behavior. You can vouch for individual comments, though.

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

#303

Post by jyu »

PaybackTony wrote: post #199

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…

How many broken systems are the result of perverse incentives?

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

#304

Post by whydid »

temp20221227 wrote: post #286

A lot of comments here suggest the Indian government is complacent in these types of operations, but I don't really believe that's the case. The Indian central government is a pretty small and unpowerful entity. Beyond securing the countries borders, and keeping the currency spinning, the government doesn't have the ability or power to do much more. They are not especially well funded (taxes are seen as especially un…

The Indian government is complacent because they allow such extreme poverty to exist where people need to seek out scams like this in order to survive.

Extreme inequities rationalized by an abusive caste system, mixed with a culture that praises creative work avoidance.

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

#305

Post by Nextgrid »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #211
Nextgrid wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's no reason consumer SIMs should be able to call more than N distinct numbers in any 24h period. Oh jesus please no, whats next? Ther is no reason a consumer oven should cook more than 5 meals a day. There is no reason a consumer toasteer should toast mpre than 10 times a day. The bread you make tourself is unauthorised in a toaster

The difference between this and cooking/toasting bread is that your bread-making activities have no way to negatively affect someone else - we don't have an epidemic of spammers paying people to bake "underground bread" in their homes.

Of course, an override should be provided - the restriction should be relaxed over time once the account is established for a long time without any complaints.

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

#306

Post by frontman1988 »

potamic wrote: post #246
frontman1988 wrote: post #213

Is it bad that I don't feel sorry for the Americans getting scammed given the obscene wealth inequality that exists between the two countries? Some wealth shifting to a poor country with millions of malnourished people might actually be a net positive to the world? Morality is complicated for sure.

It's not bad, it's reprehensible. Notwithstanding the fact that there are about a dozen moral qualms about this line of thinking, the economic conditions of the countries have little bearing on the economic situations of individuals in this interaction. I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming. And given their criminal backgrounds, they are likely to do more harm tha…

If only Gandhi's idealism was even somewhat practical. This is what he thought about the Jews: “Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

The world is not a fair place. Morality doesn't get you fed, doesn't get you proper education or healthcare. And when you don't have proper opportunities to earn money the right way, it's tough not rationalizing scamming other people to get your basic needs fullfilled. Overall it's a good thought experiment to imagine what all we would have done if we were not born with our current privilege. I personally feel people are only as good as the world allows them to be.

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

#307

Post by tshaddox »

jacquesm wrote: post #105
cute_boi wrote: post #84

These 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.

It’s bonkers to me that gift cards are so readily available to enable these scams. There’s no way the gift card providers (Target, etc.) don’t know about this, but they go out of their way to make it as easy as possible and make sure there is zero support available for scams.

It’s so infuriating. I know people who have lost hundreds of dollars to people impersonating US Social Security and immigration officers. The gift card providers do not care. The impersonated government agencies do not care. The local police do not care. The phone companies do not care. There is total and utter impunity for everyone perpetrating and enabling these scams.

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

#308

Post by Cyberdog »

api wrote: post #257
frontman1988 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.sanas.ai/ Be warned. AI accent changers will eliminate that line of defense as well.

Pretty soon it'll eliminate call centers. One person will be able to use AI to mass-robocall millions of people.

The answer? A scam call answering AI bot which engages with the scammer (or the scammer AI bot) and wastes as much of their time and international call fees as possible without giving them a valid bank account or gift card number, Kitboga[1]-style. As soon as you detect the call is coming from a scammer, you push a button and your phone takes it over from there.

Eventually we'll just have a network of AI scambots calling up AI scambaiters and having completely useless conversations in synthesized English with each other for hours upon hours and nobody will remember why.

1: https://www.youtube.com/@KitbogaShow

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

#309

Post by leftcenterright »

nigerianbrince wrote: post #131
cute_boi wrote: post #84

These 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…

Just install trucaller on their phone.

Your intention might very well be good but this is very bad advice, please do not install Truecaller! This app is a privacy nightmare. From accessing your phonebook/contact info to location, it has been known to be responsible for leaking information of journalists and for storing user data without consent.

> While TrueCaller may have laudable intentions, the privacy implications for people who end up in their database raise concerns. When a number is tagged, the person who is tagged ends up having their name and phone number stored on the TrueCaller database, despite not having consented – or even being aware – that their data was collected.

- https://privacyinternational.org/node/2997

Some of the features require excessive permissions.

- https://support.truecaller.com/support/solutions/articles/81...

- https://globalvoices.org/2022/10/14/the-true-colours-of-true...

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

#310

Post by rootusrootus »

bluedino wrote: post #89
mrsuprawsm wrote: post #78

It'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?

It's mind boggling that such a high amount of people are willing to pay up whenever they get a call or email

The fraction is quite low, but when you're pulling from a pool of people measured in billions, even a really low percentage is good enough.
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