Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 504 posts

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

#431

Post by spaceman_2020 »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #120
cute_boi wrote: post #84

These days whenever I hear Indian voice, I just reject call. They way they target grandparents is surreal. One day they told my my friends parents that their children is in accident and they have to pay in gift cards. It is so distressing to elderly people. US must take strict actions and call out India publicly. Elderly people are weak, education isn't going to solve the scam problem. Scammers must be punished harsl…

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.

I had to get a second phone with a new phone number that I only give out to close friends and family.

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

#432

Post by squeaky-clean »

grimgrin wrote: post #352
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…

similar story for me a year ago. grandpa got a call that i was in jail for hitting a car and the driver was pregnant. lost her baby. they even had “me” talk to them briefly which really got em believing. he went to bank and mailed $9500 in cash, to what ultimately appeared to be an airbnb was v sad because he felt supreme humiliation over the matter.

Happened to my uncle, he records all calls so he was able to show us. When they let him speak to "his son" he sounded just like him and even used the same greeting his son normally does with him. Was very creepy. And his real son had his phone turned off during that time.

The really weird bit is they didn't ask him to send any money out. They knew his address and some "police" showed up an hour later demanding he write them a check.

This is in Canada. They've apparently found the guy, but there's some difficulties because he's in a different province.

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

#433

Post by pards »

smachiz wrote: post #358
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…

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.

The telco's complacency have trained their customers to not answer the phone thereby destroying one of their primary businesses. Gen Z and Y consider it rude to call people.

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

#434

Post by GnarfGnarf »

Just to put things in perspective: for ~350 years (1600-1949), the West dominated and exploited India. The British taught the Indians that it was OK to steal from another nation. And they taught them English too.

What goes around comes around.

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

#435

Post by WalterBright »

mschuster91 wrote: post #407
Diesel555 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone claiming “deregulation” for the names sake is speaking rhetoric without knowledge. Both conservative and liberal economists agree with regulation. The most conservative of economists understand the concept of externalities. Call centers bear a clear externality. The business transaction between the telecom Company and the caller bears a negative externality on the callee who is not a member of that transaction…

> The most conservative of economists understand the concept of externalities. Even conservative economists (and for that matter, also other experts) usually aren't dumb, but I've never seen one of them act on their knowledge appropriately. They all prioritize their ideology and their donors, some of them even refuse to listen to science and facts when people die by the masses.

> I've never seen one of them act on their knowledge appropriately

Milton Friedman

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

#436

Post by supertrope »

jacquesm wrote: post #353
jeltz wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the will was really there I'm pretty sure this problem could be tackled. Probably, but not with any of your proposed methods. I have talked with some SMS spammers and none of what you proposed would affect them. And for SMS spammers these inconveniences are a much bigger part of the cost of doing operations than for a company which needs to have employees in a call center. They have to spend a lot of money on bu…

SMS spammers could be tackled with a couple of regexps if the will was there. The fact that these scams still work is a sign to me that there simply is no will to tackle any of this at the telco level. They know exactly what is going on.

There is already keyword filtering. Try using the word "election" in SMS at a certain time of year. A certain US political party complained about this. E2EE is not compatible with content based filtering.

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

#437

Post by temp20221227 »

Xeoncross wrote: post #94

I like that the same page shows a video of an "illegal school" being torn down by the government. Is this a joke? Like, what kind of dastardly evil people are constructing schools without permits in a country desperate trying to feed and education the large population? Is the municipality head just upset they didn't get an under-the-table payment like usual?

Not a joke.

Your concepts of building codes and property ownership are western. There's no such thing in India. Rather, there's a patchwork of policies that contradict each other and no consistent sense of which one has precedence. And land ownership is complicated by qualifications over who can sell it and claims from family members who maybe had a descendent there hundreds of years ago. And of course, various policies benefitting squatters. And whoever could forge the ownership papers nicely enough to claim it's theirs.

These things are all features and not bugs. It gives pathways for the government to dispose of any buildings that are annoying it for whatever reason. They find the law on the books that allows them to bulldoze the school the quickest, have the tractors out there within hours, and complete the process before any lawyer can get through the patchwork of laws to stop it.

> Like, what kind of dastardly evil people are constructing schools without permits in a country desperate trying to feed and education the large population?

Don't blame whomever built the school, they were trying to help! Blame the ones who tore it down.

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

#438

Post by blisterpeanuts »

codezero wrote: post #385
grimgrin wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

similar story for me a year ago. grandpa got a call that i was in jail for hitting a car and the driver was pregnant. lost her baby. they even had “me” talk to them briefly which really got em believing. he went to bank and mailed $9500 in cash, to what ultimately appeared to be an airbnb was v sad because he felt supreme humiliation over the matter.

Airbnb must be a hotbed for these sort of things. I had a friend in the 90s who would squat at unfinished or unoccupied homes while he ran fraud scams, renting an Airbnb seems much easier, since these scammers almost certainly rented it with a stolen identity.

A friend?

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

#439

Post by saxonww »

javajosh wrote: post #281
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…

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

My grandmother got talked into mailing cash between the pages of a magazine. I don't really know what to say other than the format of the money doesn't matter too much, someone is going to try to scam people out of it, and the scams are going to work.

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

#440

Post by thunkshift1 »

faxmeyourcode wrote: post #62

These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this scale. At the bare minimum they're at least looking the other way. My grandparents are the targets for this kind of scam, and when they call their bank they get an Indian customer service rep to discuss the situation with. Absolutely disgusting that the situation has been tolerated for so long.

It is actually netflix doing this, so that they get more content for jamtara season 3
Post reply on HN