341–350 of 504 posts
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…
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…
As bad as it is to say, I mostly do the same. You'd think India would be on top of this and come down hard. If folks just start associating Indian accents as 'scammers', businesses abroad that currently rely on outsourcing support and other services are going to eventually have to pull out. You can't run effective customer support if the customer assumes you're a bad actor just because of your voice and hangs up.
Unfortunately, that use of that word is popular among Indians, but any half-measure guidance leaves room for an already susceptible mark to convince themselves that maybe this email is not a scam.
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Is that the case? When I worked in telefony abuse, like this, was pretty hard to track because of all the middlemen involved. They'd have phone banks with multiple phone numbers that they'd lease from providers in India who worked with them to rotate through outbound numbers. India doesn't allow Americans telefony companies, much less voip (in order to provide these telefony companies business), so looking at India f…
What would happen if the American companies just started playing hardball? For example, what if they required that contracts with foreign telephone companies had a fee based on scams detected as coming through and just refused to work with any company that wouldn't agree to those terms? I have no idea if that exact idea would make sense or even be possible to implement, but my thinking is that in many cases the Ameri…
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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 g…
Every store I've been in within the past couple of years has had warnings posted everywhere not to buy gift cards and read the codes to unknown people over the phone. I'm not sure if there's an alternative, since I'd seriously rather not ID be required to buy or use a gift card.
And as far as making gift cards safer, shouldn’t that be the responsibility of the gift card providers, not to mention regulators tasked with consumer safety? Why is it that the scammers seem to ask for gift cards rather than, say, banking details? (I’m sure there’s also some banking scams, but I have a feeling there’s non-zero recourse for victims in those cases.)
If it truly is somehow impossible to make gift cards safe to use, then I’m convinced society could survive without them. But I doubt it’s impossible. I suspect gift providers deliberately go out of their way to make sure victims have no recourse.
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?
1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/europol-phone-...
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…
My grandmother got hit with one of these, she has a weak heart and was in severe mental distress all day because she couldn't get ahold of me to confirm what the scammers were telling her.
I try not to judge others, but what monster can do this for a living?
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…
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
Most of the losses (in $ terms) from these scams do not involve gift cards. They involve the scammers convincing you to install some remote desktop software and emptying your bank account.
It's already illegal to send people to open bank accounts with fake IDs, but the scammers have no problem cashing out the bulk of their profits like that.
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Pretty soon it'll eliminate call centers. One person will be able to use AI to mass-robocall millions of people.
What a dystopian, terrifying prospect. On a personal level I keep a referee's whistle handy in case I'm talking to a scammer live. They are usually wearing headsets and any damage I can do to their hearing with that may save an old persons savings in the following few minutes. Best technique is to speak softly so they turn their volume up then let rip on the whistle