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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

#331

Post by throwaway98797 »

JTbane wrote: post #215
TechBro8615 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a lot more patient than me. I've stopped answering calls from unknown numbers. I get 3-4 calls per day, which luckily I can auto-ignore on iOS.

Yeah, no, this works great until you get an actually important call from a previously unknown number (hospital, job interview, etc.)

only problem i have is with deliver or restaurant reservations

so i unpause the silence during that time

the hospital is def an issue, i don’t have a great solution there especially for unplanned emergencies.

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

#332

Post by zinclozenge »

_-david-_ wrote: post #328
javajosh wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I realize this is a big ask - but can you please write this up as a story and sent it to a major news outlet? My cynicism is already high, but I would not have suspected this of all things, that telcos would allow the elderly to be victimized to the tune of $10B to make a few pennies. Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal

>Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal And when scammers go back to using Western Union are you going to ban that as well? When they ask a person to send them cash are you going to ban cash as well? Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.

> Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.

You might be on to something here.

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

#333

Post by Cyberdog »

mnky9800n wrote: post #137
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?

i get plenty of sms though. very annoying to get it to stop. you can reply STOP or whatever they suggest to reply to stop the messages but it doesn't seem to do anything.

As with replying "unsubscribe" to spam messages, replying with "stop" to spam texts may just notify the senders that your email account is still active and being read by a human. If it's not from a legit organization which will actually respect your "stop/unsubscribe," just delete the message and don't reply at all.

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

#335

Post by wallfacer120 »

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…

[dead]

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

#336

Post by nojs »

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…

It may also be that they see this as a slippery slope of being responsible for moderating the content of phone calls, which is not a road I imagine carriers want to go down.

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

#337

Post by baron816 »

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…

Can you please tell this to congress?

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

#338

Post by tigeroil »

ketanmaheshwari wrote: post #249

Disclaimer: I am a person of Indian origin. I personally do not think reprimanding India will solve this. If somehow India stops this the void will be filled by scammers from some other country. This calls for reforms in telecommunications systems / regulations / norms / protocols.

Thing is, there's other nationalities who quite frankly would probably be a lot more effective at coming off as convincing to potential victims, especially given the unfortunate effect this has had on the Indian people's reputation.

The fact that we haven't really seen anything near the level of Indian call centres tells me that this is unlikely.

I'm not saying that scammers don't exist in other countries, but that it's very rare to see anything with the level of sophistication and organisation that we see in India.

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

#339

Post by notahacker »

ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #251
faxmeyourcode wrote: post #62

These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this scale. At the bare minimum they're at least looking the other way. My grandparents are the targets for this kind of scam, and when they call their bank they get an Indian customer service rep to discuss the situation with. Absolutely disgusting that the situation has been tolerated for so long.

> These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this scale. At the bare minimum they're at least looking the other way. Its more like 1. They don't care 2. Those who care, don't have time to work on problems of Non-Citizens when the citizens are suffering too India is a country of almost 1.4 Billion people. That is 1 Europe + 1 North America + around 200 Million people more (figures from google search, may no…

> Indian law enforcement is archaic, understaffed, and riddled with corruption...And tbh I don't blame them for putting citizen's problems over non-citizens. Thats literally what every country would do.

Not to mention consistently and effectively prosecuting people for this sort of crime takes two sides of law enforcement to tango (the perpetrator of the crime may be in India, but the victim is in the United States, as is the local police report they file, the spoofed number and the first part of the telco chain that eventually ends up in a normal looking office in an Indian city). Sometimes a relevant Indian police department may get that information in a form which is useful to both shut down operations and punish the operators, but even if the Indian police were incorruptible, a model of efficiency and particularly hot on white collar crimes committed overseas, I'm not sure their US counterparts are providing so much information that scammers wouldn't feel they could get away with it often enough to try.

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

#340

Post by theGnuMe »

dxbydt wrote: post #232

Until last year, I was completely unaware of this problem. I made a stupid, stupid mistake - registered a .us TLD using “Google Domains” - within minutes of registration, the calls started. Some Indian voice offering website construction, ios app, android app, tech support, on & on…over 100 calls in a single week! Used call block but they kept coming. They switch numbers and send 1000s of text messages - neverending…

After a hail storm comes thru, hundreds of calls from "roofers".
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