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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

#451

Post by shockeychap »

patrec wrote: post #372
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…

> I'm sad to say it, but it's more dangerous than ever to be old or naive It will get orders of magnitude worse once all this can be fully automated by AI (including a completely realistic video or voice call by the grandson where he talks about killing the pregnant woman).

Yes it will.

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

#452

Post by mnky9800n »

Cyberdog wrote: post #333
mnky9800n wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i get plenty of sms though. very annoying to get it to stop. you can reply STOP or whatever they suggest to reply to stop the messages but it doesn't seem to do anything.

As with replying "unsubscribe" to spam messages, replying with "stop" to spam texts may just notify the senders that your email account is still active and being read by a human. If it's not from a legit organization which will actually respect your "stop/unsubscribe," just delete the message and don't reply at all.

Yeah I'm thinking about legitimate businesses that I shop at that keep sending me coupons I don't want.

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

#453

Post by josephcsible »

supertrope wrote: post #449
josephcsible wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with services like this is that some automated calls are legitimate.

Most "legitimate" robocalls from a school or doctor's office are better off as SMS. Does an appointment reminder really need my immediate undivided attention? If it's not worth having an employee manually make the call it's probably not worth my time to answer.

Sure, maybe they should be that way. But until they are that way, this doesn't seem like a feasible solution.

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

#454

Post by dang »

bbbbb5 wrote: post #341
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…

[flagged]

Can you please edit swipes and putdowns out of your HN comments? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be fine with just the last two paragraphs, which make your substantive point.

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

#455

Post by TeMPOraL »

distances wrote: post #321
TeMPOraL wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact two fundamental and official mass communication channels are functionally useless is a sign of the rot in our country. It's a problem everywhere. This is what you get when you let the advertising industry operate unchecked. Scam calls and snail mail spam are just piggybacking on the fact that phone companies and postal services encourage and make money on telemarketing and mass marketing e-mails. It's goin…

It is not a problem everywhere. I do not get snail mail spam or call spam in Germany. For post it was enough to put up a sticker that forbids advertisements. No idea really why call/sms spam isn't a problem.

I envy you. You're either incredibly lucky, or Germans are really law-abiding.

Here in Poland, the sticker that forbids advertisements does jack all. The post office might stop delivering spam, but most of the garbage in my mailbox comes from private individuals, hired by local companies, delivering the spam personally.

Call/SMS spam dropped somewhat thanks to GDPR, though I've experienced a uptick in the past few years, primarily driven by cryptocurrency scammers and fly-by-night companies selling photovoltaics. I do get an extra amount of phone spam, because I had a business and my phone number is listed in the business database.

Note that I do consider first-party (as in, from companies I have relationship with) cold calls as spam and scam too. Telcos in particular are notorious for scamming people - at this point, there is not much of a difference between scams discussed in this thread, and technically legal upsells and bullshitting done by my phone operator.

(They're not that better off-line, either. Only few weeks ago, a sales rep from a high-profile salon tried to scam my grandmother, by deceiving, manipulating, outright lying and using psychological pressure tactics, to get her to sign for a TV and Internet service she doesn't want or need. That happened physically, in the salon, when she went there to take over my late grandfader's phone contract.)

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

#456

Post by cuteboy19 »

javajosh wrote: post #418
_-david-_ wrote: post #328

Earlier 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…

Perhaps the solution is to (further) stigmatize gift cards. The Chinese seem to have figured it out with their red envelopes full of money.

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

#457

Post by pcthrowaway »

username_my1 wrote: post #122
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?

I think it's because of the language. No one in the EU (outside UK) will receive a call in English and think this is legitimate In the US if you call any company you would expect someone with an accent

I'm confused by this. Huge parts of Germany (and maybe Greece) are English speaking. In Berlin you hear more English than German being spoken on the street. Denmark and Holland seem to have high numbers of English speakers as well.

I think several other countries conduct a lot of business in English, but I haven't spent enough time in Europe to know this for sure.

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

#458

Post by cuteboy19 »

nigerianbrince wrote: post #140
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.

I doubt it. It's < 0.003% of indian gdp.

They probably don't even get the tax revenue from that. But no doubt local politicians and police are complicit, as with most other crimes

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

#459

Post by bbbbb5 »

dang wrote: post #454
bbbbb5 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you please edit swipes and putdowns out of your HN comments? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Your comment would be fine with just the last two paragraphs, which make your substantive point.

Can't edit comments that old, but I feel like my first sentence was perfectly appropriate given the parents appeal to authority ("I built telecommunications systems / software for some time").

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

#460

Post by bbbbb5 »

PaybackTony wrote: post #415
bbbbb5 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

>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.

You're severely underestimating the success rate of these calls.

> Typically it's $20 here, $100 there. Again, volume

This is perplexing, even the gift card scams don't target such low amounts. The only logical conclusion is that we're talking about completely different kinds of scams.

The kinds of scams targeting amounts you speak of tend to be slightly less obvious ones, selling bullshit services and actually running credit cards. These operations often aren't even necessarily criminal, beyond perhaps the spammy part.

> You hear about the big "wins" a lot (Grandma scammed for 50k+) but those are outliers.

Nah, those are the bulk of this $10B figure. Tricking a grandma to install teamviewer and emptying her account isn't much of a challenge.

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