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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

#391

Post by supertrope »

Mistletoe wrote: post #370
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 won…

Yeah there's something off about the person's competence. This is not a corrupt country with bag men and personal connections trumping law. Anything important is in writing. Even if this were a real personal injury tragedy $10K in blood money won't make legal problems go away. That's barely enough for an ambulance ride, ER examination, and some imaging.

Just like email phishing educating the public is very laborious but it is the ultimate solution. There will still be a few people who fall for scams no matter how extensive the PSA campaigns.

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

#392

Post by zackmorris »

nostromo wrote: post #366
zackmorris wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.")

That sounds plausible, I can understand that carriers shouldn't filter traffic, because that goes against net neutrality. So it sounds like carriers can't block traffic at their level, but can attach metadata that the end user can block. I did a quick search on how that would work and found this info from Robokiller (no affiliation):

https://www.robokiller.com/robocall-blocking-technology

Under the Governmental backing turndown arrow:

We’re fighting behind the scenes to get government support for better fighting robocalls. The FCC’s TRACED Act is just one piece of legislation we’re behind that will increase penalties for robocallers–but there’s far more work that needs to be done.

I realized a TL;DR of my rant after writing it:

Organized crime is stealing from members of the community and the police rarely succeed in returning stolen property. The mayor claims to be trying to help, but mostly works at reelection. Half the community wants to pass a law to fine a middleman who sees crime occurring but does little to stop it. The other half claims that the law itself facilitates the crime and wants to cancel more laws. Some people hire a watchdog to prevent the crime, and that seems to work. Others feel that if the crime affects the whole community, then a solution should be part of the commons, because vulnerable and/or impoverished members of the community would be left defenseless otherwise.

I'm in that second camp. I feel that a conservative argument here is: if I have to be bothered by every little thing because the government can't do its job to defend the community and the security of its property, then that's not a republic, it's anarchy.

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

#393

Post by supertrope »

baron816 wrote: post #337
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?

Congress already passed the TRACED Act. The FCC is moving relatively quickly in issuing government orders (as fast as a federal agency can move). It will take years for phone companies to upgrade to signing calls with level A attestation. Right now 20% of calls are signed and that includes level B attestation (we know the number is not spoofed but not who is using it) and level C (we only know the upstream phone company). If signing is implemented it will take more time to finally cut off non-signed calls. Tracing abuse takes time. Then robocallers can not pay fines and open another LLC. Hopefully this will reach an equilibrium like email where 99% of raw email traffic is spam but spam filters make it reasonable for individuals.

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

#394

Post by [deleted] »

supertrope wrote: post #382
nostromo wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.")

The FCC gave the green light to blocking spam in June 2019. https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2019/06/05/beating-back... . This resolved AT&T's concern/excuse that their legal obligation to connect all calls included spam.

[deleted]

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

#395

Post by Nifty3929 »

nostromo wrote: post #366
zackmorris wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.")

I gave you an upvote even though I'm going to disagree with you. In general, I'm very open-market and low-regulation - however in this particular case you're touching on the idea of a "common carrier," which is an important idea.

When you have one (or a small number of) providers, in a high-barrier-to-entry industry, that provides a critical service - this gives these providers enormous power over us if they were to refuse to do business with us or charge us higher rates. Think water, electric, shipping/postal, internet access, telco, etc.

What if the postal service decided to stop doing business with you, perhaps because of the offensive content of the letters you want to send? Or nobody will ship your merchandise because they don't approve of it? Or your internet provider cancels you? And what if there are a small number of them that collude on these bans, so now you can't even switch providers?

By designating certain industries as "common carriers" it prohibits them from denying service to anyone for any reason, except for particularly obvious, egregious and illegal reasons.

If you want to send out Nazi propaganda newsletters to people who have requested them - the US Postal Service will (and should, I believe) deliver them for you.

We should not allow telcos to decide who's calls to put through. This is a job for legislators and law enforcement, however imperfect those solutions are.

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

#396

Post by supertrope »

hikingsimulator wrote: post #100
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?

Lucky you. I usually get one or two spam calls a day in Europe (France/Germany) but they are marked as spam. Bless the people keeping that red list up to date. This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.

Spam filtering for phone calls is in its infancy. Only 20% of calls are signed https://transnexus.com/blog/2022/shaken-statistics-november/. Some robocalls are signed. Many legitimate calls are blocked. I ignore all unknown callers.

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

#397

Post by mixmastamyk »

bbbbb5 wrote: post #348
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 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.

How do they get the big bucks out of the last bank?

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

#398

Post by imglorp »

jeltz wrote: post #261
imglorp wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the subtext is that given valid caller IDs, then block lists can be made. The US FTC might manage them like it does the do-not-call lists, or the perhaps the US Attorney's office, after some criminal complaints. Ideally, the telco would implement these block lists, but also ideally, they could be traded around like web ad block lists for individuals to load on their phones. I think we all know scam calls are…

> I think we all know scam calls are a serious source of revenue for carriers, so they will need to be led to this conclusion by force. Why would they be a major revenue source? The carriers make their money from normal users, not dodgy call centers.

Logically, there must be enough benefit for them carrying spoofed robocalls to risk regulatory attention AND driving away all their voice revenue. Many people have stopped answering their phones altogether since voice calls became unusable.

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

#399

Post by supertrope »

saghm wrote: post #154
kodah wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The FCC has ordered American phone companies to drop traffic from known spam conduit phone companies. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-global-uc-robocall-m... Hopefully this will tighten the noose and make robocall traffic radioactive.

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

#400

Post by supertrope »

negamax wrote: post #259
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.

Can't they implement DKIM, SPF etc. like system? Not aware of technical reality of Telcos but international number spoofing should be easily solvable as billing is done through the origin location

It's still in the early days of even deploying signing. Telcos are dragging their feet asking for exemptions and delays. Once virtually all calls are signed, then there has to be agreement on when to block unsigned traffic, and finally whack a mole with banning spammers and KYC to keep them banned.
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