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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

#361

Post by thorncorona »

kodah wrote: post #343
saghm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The form of hardball (that I'm aware of) would be blacklisting providers, which means good faith people get blocked along with bad faith people. That'd limit a lot of people from the US communicating back to India. It would be possible to block inbound but not outbound calls though, I believe.

In that case the good faith people can move to a different provider and the problem will self segregate out.

Pretty much everyone who communicates overseas use apps now because they’re free.

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

#362

Post by modriano »

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.

I don't think this is a complicated moral issue, and it takes some really sloppy thinking to see any ambiguity here.

Defrauding individual people out of their savings is bad, even if the victims live in an expensive country that's home to some very wealthy citizens (like the US), and the criminals live in a country that's home to some very poor citizens (like India). How could the existence of poverty in India make it moral for college educated Indian scammers who live lavishly on the stolen savings of Americans [0] (youtube has plenty of scammer channels that show scammers are mostly college educated Indians who never, ever give the money to the poor and malnourished)?

[0] https://youtu.be/rfX8ZlBK0Uo?t=635

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

#363

Post by shockeychap »

bbbbb5 wrote: post #341
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…

[flagged]

> You might have telco experience, but you have no clue whatsoever about the economics of these scams.

Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of what they said.

Furthermore, saying "it makes no difference to the scammers if they're paying 10c per minute or calling for free" shows an equally clear failure to understand the economics of these scams. The vast majority of calls made by a scammer will yield nothing. They have to make numerous calls to find the one sucker who can be convinced to turn over their financial information or mail cash or do whatever needs to be done. I don't know the exact per-minute cost at which most scams become cost prohibitive, but I'm pretty sure you'd be shocked at how little it is. If it takes 2,000 calls to find one victim, and you're paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend $200 per victim. Will you make that much back, and will it be enough to offset all of the other costs involved in trolling? It depends. But it definitely makes it less appetizing than when the calls are free.

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

#364

Post by nostromo »

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…

You've missed the legal / regulatory side of things.

Apparently this has just recently changed, but telcos are highly regulated in the US and they are legally required to execute calls placed by their customers. This means that they have to be very very sure the call should be blocked before doing so, otherwise they face legal liability. This regulatory structure means that call spamming in the US is all but legally protected.

Compare this to less-regulated email, where Gmail and other providers are free to block spam based on any reason: source ip, domain, content of the email, etc.

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

#365

Post by neerajsi »

Nextgrid wrote: post #262
bayesian_horse wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it's not that easy. They can use international VOIP providers to route their calls, maybe even run their own, rotating the numbers they use and disguising the actual origin. If that wouldn't work you could probably hire people in other countries to put some agent software on something like a smart phone and use these.

It is that easy. Regardless of what convoluted setup they're using, at some point those calls need to get to the US-based carrier. That is where they can be blocked. The carrier can simply say "we'll stop peering with you if more than 10% of your calls are spam" and the upstream carriers will have to clean up their act (better screen their customers or implement similar terms) or be cut off from being able to reach t…

The problem is bad enough that a us customer might pay extra to not receive those calls. So maybe the phone company can profit off of a service to solve the problem.

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

#366

Post by nostromo »

zackmorris wrote: post #325
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…

This is a classic example of an unintended consequence of deregulation. Normally we could petition our elected officials and get something done about it. But lobbyists have come to so completely dominate our legislative process that whole industries have effectively coopted the government through regulatory capture. On top of that, they've hoodwinked half the population into thinking that regulation bad. At this poin…

Telcos are one of the most regulated industries in existence.

And as I point out in my sibling comment, bad regulation is the reason this problem exists: because telcos are not legally able to block most spam calls. If not for this regulation, telcos would have solved spam callers long ago by blocking suspected sources of spam. (Instead, they do work-arounds like labeling them "scam likely.")

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

#367

Post by Lex-2008 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #266
pnw wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Feds already started on this with STIR/SHAKEN protocol which has been mandated by the FCC for most carriers in recent years. However, just like email spam, stopping spoofed calls is harder in practice than in theory.

It can be very easy, depending on your comfort with breaking existing systems. Disable all inbound international calling and you no longer have a problem. That would remove 99% of spam and would have zero negative impact to 99% of individuals who receive calls. Of course, businesses with a lot of money care about use cases in that last 1%.

Can't you disable international calls only for individuals who don't need them?

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

#368

Post by bbbbb5 »

shockeychap wrote: post #363
bbbbb5 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> You might have telco experience, but you have no clue whatsoever about the economics of these scams. Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of what they said. Furthermore, saying "it makes no difference to the scammers if they're paying 10c per minute or calling for free" shows an equally clear failure to understand the economics of the…

>Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of what they said.

It's not defaming the OP. I did address the merit of what they said.

> If it takes 2,000 calls to find one victim, and you're paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend $200 per victim.

Yes, but in reality it takes less than 10 calls to find one victim.

> Will you make that much back, and will it be enough to offset all of the other costs involved in trolling?

These scammers are pulling hundreds of thousands from individual victims. Even at the low end they're earning thousands.

These scams are so profitable that you can't increase costs of calling enough to stop them while also keeping phone calls accessible to normal people.

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

#369

Post by sneak »

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.)

Anyone who calls me versus emailing/texting is not getting to me, full stop.

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

#370

Post by Mistletoe »

shockeychap wrote: post #220

My uncle almost drove two states away to give a stranger $10,000 because he was duped into believing his grandson had gotten into an accident and killed a pregnant woman. The only thing that stopped it was that he first needed to borrow the money, which led to my involvement. We made some calls and were quickly able to confirm that the grandson in question was at home and nowhere near the "accident" in question. My p…

It scares me very much that these people vote and the terrible state of American politics largely reflects that. If you can’t have the forethought to call your grandson to see before giving someone $10,000, do you have the brain capacity to make an intelligent voting choice?

I know this is a tangent to your comment but after seeing my parents and others their age do similar things to what you describe it makes me wonder about voting and driving with no age limits or proof of non-dementia.

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