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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

#421

Post by banana_giraffe »

elephanlemon wrote: post #255
frontman1988 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.sanas.ai/ Be warned. AI accent changers will eliminate that line of defense as well.

I’m worried what will happen when deepfaked voices improve to the point that you can get a realistic impression with only a very small training set. Imagine receiving a phone call in the voice of a family member telling you that they’re in serious trouble.

I once got a spear phishing call from a scammer claiming to be the CEO of the company I work for. Even though I barely know the CEO, the phrases he was using was obviously wrong.

I'd imagine that's even more obvious for any family member. If a family member calls from any number that's not their number, my first question will be an honest "How the heck did you remember my phone number?"

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

#422

Post by supertrope »

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.)

That is a cost I will accept. I used to get about 3 robocalls per day, or 1000 robocalls for every legitimate unknown caller. There is a fundamental tradeoff between optimizing for minimizing false positives or false negatives.

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

#423

Post by spyder »

It will get worse with the advancement of AI and could scam the less vulnerable people too for example by voice cloning from few minutes of a voice sample of your friends or relatives. There was a CEO of a company who already got scammed in a similar way:

https://www.identityiq.com/scams-and-fraud/scammers-use-ai-g...

And the even more scary thing will be when they will be able to use a ChatGPT like AI to automate the whole thing in the future.

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

#425

Post by grammers »

tester457 wrote: post #145
grammers wrote: post #82

I once had an issue with Microsoft at work and had to get MS support to help me. They literally called me on the landline and asked for remote control of my computer. It was totally legit. Still I felt uncomfortable and asked for a Teams session with screensharing instead (and not remote access), but this 'was not possible'. So, how are people to distinguish between 'fake' calls and real ones if companies still use s…

Maybe their email domains, I don't think scammers can get a hold of domains like "microsoftsupport.com"

They couldn't get it to work on Linux anyway. So I just stopped and never got the issue resolved...

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

#426

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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's nightmarish in India too right now. The spam is relentless, but they now target Whatsapp messages. Older people in India treat Whatsapp as the gospel and believe that anything that pops up on Whatsapp is "official".

I've got my parents to essentially keep just the bare minimum in their bank accounts, to cancel all debit cards, and keep all extra funds in fixed deposits that you can't withdraw from online (have to visit the branch).

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

#427

Post by ligerzer0 »

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…

What blows my mind is scammers can spoof real people's phone numbers... Like shouldn't that be a top priority to shut down ?

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

#428

Post by spaceman_2020 »

debarshri wrote: post #112

It is not just Americans who affected by these scams. It is also Indian elderly population too who are affected by these scams. I think Indian authorities are very slow to react to these issues because police dont really understand the impact these calls make. Also they are paid off and are often of part of the mafia that runs them. My parent's friends have also been scammed. The Netflix series "Jamtara" really shows…

So many of these scam call center operators masquerade as honest businessmen, even winning local awards. Sickening.

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

#429

Post by nurettin »

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…

> There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it

What are these easy few regulatory/technical mechanisms?

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

#430

Post by kristopolous »

balls187 wrote: post #297
honkler wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah. we'll sanction india, and then india will cooperate.

So do you believe the Indian government is complicit in such cyber crimes?

Different replier - no but they're incompetently handling the problem because these call centers haven't seemed to pop up elsewhere

Now before you say "well India has high English proficiency" countries like Nigeria, Kenya and the Philippines best India here with higher English proficiency and don't have the issue (Nigeria has a similar email one of course) They're quite a bit poorer as well.

There's some major policy failure here India needs to figure out. Of course they don't want rampant crime but everything points to how they're domestically handling that crime as the problem here.

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