Did the economy benefit over $10B from allowing voip calls to spoof numbers? I feel like dropping that ability would be a net win - would be much harder to spoof the elderly with a scam coming from a clearly foreign number
Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
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Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Would you please follow the site guidelines? They explicitly ask you not post this sort of dross, which only makes things worse.
Indeed you managed to break several of them with this one post. Not cool.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem is, education alone won't help. Dementia, alzheimer's etc. are horrible, and ffs even experts on scams can get scammed like one of the scambaiter Youtubers (iirc Jim Browning?).
You need to fix scams at the source: sanction India and other countries until they kick up efforts to neutralize scammers, and replace insecure systems like SSN.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree with the Russian sanctions, you're doing collective punishment on a population of people, many of whom presumably don't even support the war. It may be an effective strategy but that alone doesn't justify it
How do you punish and manipulate a government without punishing its people, either as a side effect or direct goal? Even if you come up with some way to somehow target specifically how the government functions but entirely spare the citizens from externalities, the government will just hold its citizenry "hostage".
I don't think we should be coercing their government to do anything, we should educate our own citizenry, build infrastructure to protect against it, lobby the international community to make a legal process for it, or all three
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#415I 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…
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At one point I worked on the very systems they used (dialers, PBX, internal CRMs), with the carriers that enabled it. This wasn't an opinion of mine, I was merely passing along real-world information from someone who worked in the industry (me). Many in this thread completely underestimate the volume these centers call at. We aren't talking hundreds of thousands of minutes per month per center. We're talking millions of minutes. Cost per minute is a massive cost
even at 1/6 increments. The call center we ran, that was direct marketing / support typically had telecom bills well into the 6 figures every month at the height.
Their scams are purposefully asinine. It's not profitable to spend time and effort into tricking the wise into an unwise act. It's far more profitable searching for the unwise to act in kind. So when you throw your hands up asking "Who would fall for that!?" The answer is typically: Someone who'd be willing to buy a gift card or share bank account info. This contradicts your last point that a given locale is more or less likely to be scammed given the native language.
Language barriers are a part of the issue, yes, but these centers are capable of calling and speaking a number of languages. Cost and regulation are the big factors here. Just like any other business model. I got out of the business (telecom / direct marketing saas) right when EU started raising fees and coming down on some of the bad actors. Unfortunately for the US, that meant those bad actors focused even more in the US.
Also, the scams really aren't as profitable as you'd think most of the time. They generally can't afford more than a $50 CPA at best. Again, they have to turn heavy volume to get to their target market. They also rotate "offers". You hear about the big "wins" a lot (Grandma scammed for 50k+) but those are outliers. Typically it's $20 here, $100 there. Again, volume.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#416Earlier 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.
Phone companies make money by the minute.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Voice revenue has been replaced by cellphone bills which are mostly broadband.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#418Earlier 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.
I want gift cards banned not because of scammers. Like pay-day loan services, gift cards are based on the fraud of profound information asymmetry. Gift cards make liquid cash worse in almost every dimension. It's tied to one supplier. It can be lost. I forgot the stats, but I'm positive billions spent on gift cards are never redeemed.
Gift cards are just slightly less evil than payday loan services. They take advantage of a (positive) human need to give, and a (negative) human need to not work hard, picking out a gift, and a (negative) need to appear to have purchased a gift when one, in fact, has not. What makes it even more evil is that because it's a gift the loss is not seen as important for the giver (they gave it away after all) or the receiver (they weren't expecting to have this thing). The burden on the receiver, to carry around this extra piece of plastic, having to remember to use it, possibly even altering your behavior to use it, makes it even more nefarious.
I don't think my position is particularly common. Certainly gift card industry fraud is low on the list of societies pressing problems. But it is a problem and one that I wish was better understood .
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
I want gift cards banned not because of scammers. Like pay-day loan services, gift cards are based on the fraud of profound information asymmetry. Gift cards make liquid cash worse in almost every dimension. It's tied to one supplier. It can be lost. I forgot the stats, but I'm positive billions spent on gift cards are never redeemed. Gift cards are just slightly less evil than payday loan services. They take advanta…
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Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#420I 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…
Are you referring to STIR/SHAKEN that is a requirement and has been/is being rolled out? I'm not sure how much was commercial benefit vs lazyness/no incentive to solve the issue directly - the telcos aren't making a lot of money on inbound calling. It's just a problem that didn't impact them directly - only their customers.
Have to touch on this as it's a common theme to my response. There absolutely are regulations. However, regulations being in place, and the enforcement of these regulations are different. STIR/SHAKEN is a requirement, however it's an easy requirement for scammers to meet. (Numbers are super cheap to buy in bulk, pennies per month typically). Sooner or later they'll run out.
The second side of the regulation miss is that carriers have to self-report much of the time. These centers pay into the 6 figures monthly to their carriers. The carriers know exactly what kind of traffic is being sent through and many times aide these scammers in shaping the traffic to look more legit. Auto-warranty scams in the past? Huge amounts of that traffic were routed through the likes of Y-Tel and a couple others. Regulators knew this but enforcement took years to happen. It's the same right now.
Lastly is the issue of what happens once enforcement occurs? The answer is not great: The scammers change numbers and keep going. They aren't local and it's not cut and dry when it comes to continuous enforcement against foreign entities. Their carriers still support them and the fines are typically less than a month's revenue from the larger outfits (think Uber).
Better meta-data helps aide robo / scam / spam blockers. IMO, we should just shut down these carriers who knowingly aide these scammers. We know who they are, they aren't hard to find.