41–50 of 62 posts
This is a great interactive article about what it's like to be kidnapped and forced to work in these scam centers on the Myanmar border, lured by promise of jobs people are trapped, passports confiscated, phones stolen, 16-hour workdays spent defrauding victims online, cultivating fake relationships and pressuring them into investment or romance scams: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this > From Google's perspective - someone bought a gift card in the US, and redeemed it somewhere else in the US hmm really? is this coming from a google PR firm or what? if that's the google's "perspective", unfortunately that means google is really technically inept or morally corrupt enough to watch a lot of people, including Americans, go thru the torture and being incinerated. if Google receives a lot of "I was…
> if Google receives a lot of "I was scammed into this" from whoever bought the giftcard Google doesn't sell the cards directly - at least not the ones purchased at the supermarket and used for scamming. There's a scummy industry of middlemen that handles this - that's why every store can sell basically every gift card; they don't have their PoS interact with every single vendor's API, they delegate to a middleman. S…
well, even if they are, if google got scam-report, then isn't google obliged to start some investigation? are you ok with "well that's too bad you're scammed"?
> Gift cards and redeeming is exclusively Indians targeting the US market (in the UK they have money mules to launder actual bank transfers, so no need for gift cards).
well nope it's a thing everywhere -- even in some east-asian country, there's a public advertisement targeting convenient-store workers: "don't give google redeem code even if the person claims to work for the cvs chain"
AND...
> Google doesn't sell the cards directly - at least not the ones purchased at the supermarket and used for scamming.
wow... ok so where does that "redeem card" come from? are you saying stores can generate those redeem codes? ...something doesn't seem right here...?
> Ideally the whole "gift card" industry just goes away as there's no good reason to have it when we already have the ultimate form of "gift card" in the form of money... but until then, even if Google were to step out of the game someone else will step in (the company issuing the cards isn't directly involved, their gift card is just used as a negotiable instrument in lieu of cash during the scam transaction, so any company's will do).
wtf is this... are we talking about some random mom&pop store-issued giftcards? is Google a mom&pop store? is the "google doing a giftcard biz" so valuable enough to license them turning blind-eye?
> Cambodia/etc is pig butchering/fake investment scams
cambodian operation is massive enough that it INCLUDES google-giftcard scheme.
idk, all this adds up to one thing: google needs to replace whatever PR firm it's using
"It [starlink] does not have licensed operations in Myanmar, but at least hundreds of terminals have been smuggled into the Southeast Asian nation." So how do starlinks work in Myanmar if it's not licensed?
Perhaps they were using the "roam" version (https://starlink.com/roam), which seems to work pretty much anywhere.
"It [starlink] does not have licensed operations in Myanmar, but at least hundreds of terminals have been smuggled into the Southeast Asian nation." So how do starlinks work in Myanmar if it's not licensed?
Seems like we're hearing a lot about this lately, it must have gotten real bad if there's suddenly all this movement to crack down on it.
Article is from the 20th so you're probably hearing about the same specific action
As early as a few years ago, these people were engaged in fraudulent activities in Southeast Asia. Most of them were Chinese, but the Chinese government was too soft and did not take effective measures against the fraud. As a result, for a long time, these people did not receive the approval of the dispute until a Korean appeared.
This is a great interactive article about what it's like to be kidnapped and forced to work in these scam centers on the Myanmar border, lured by promise of jobs people are trapped, passports confiscated, phones stolen, 16-hour workdays spent defrauding victims online, cultivating fake relationships and pressuring them into investment or romance scams: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not actually the scammers that are redeeming the gift cards - instead they are in turn reselling the codes on marketplaces (to legitimate customers) for a small loss as a way of laundering them. From Google's perspective - someone bought a gift card in the US, and redeemed it somewhere else in the US, aka the expected behavior of legitimate gift card usage.
Gift cards are an idea whose time has passed. All they seem useful now is for scams and laundering money. All this plastic waste and fraud, so that a few legit customers can turn general-purpose money into company-specific money. Ridiculous product that should go away.
Shutdown because they either stopped paying their dues or didn't agree to the recent increase
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not actually the scammers that are redeeming the gift cards - instead they are in turn reselling the codes on marketplaces (to legitimate customers) for a small loss as a way of laundering them. From Google's perspective - someone bought a gift card in the US, and redeemed it somewhere else in the US, aka the expected behavior of legitimate gift card usage.
Gift cards are an idea whose time has passed. All they seem useful now is for scams and laundering money. All this plastic waste and fraud, so that a few legit customers can turn general-purpose money into company-specific money. Ridiculous product that should go away.