There's this guy called Karl Rock who busts such scam call centres. You can find the playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMhislZnB_6e0G4Qo1pcZD0Qb...
Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
471–480 of 504 posts
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#472[flagged]
My understanding is that most of these scams use spoofed numbers (or legitimate forwarding numbers), so there's no "just ignore it" remediation. SHAKEN/STIR[1] is meant to address this kind of spoofing, but it's not a stretch to imagine that these kinds of scams mostly target older people who are less likely to have (or understand) Caller ID anyways. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
Shaken/stir isn’t a panacea however: https://transnexus.com/blog/2022/shaken-statistics-november/
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#473I 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 ?
That sounds like it might cost money, though. It's free to just do nothing about it.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#474Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#475My wife worked in one such company several years ago. The interesting thing is that while hiring her, she couldn't even anticipate that the company was a scam. The company described itself as a certified technical support service. They showed her such a rosy picture of the work they did. It was only after a couple of weeks, when they had explained the processes, that she realized it was a scam.
She left soon thereafter. By the way, they were ready to pay whatever she asked for (up to a reasonable limit of course). The tragedy is that people in countries like India need to survive, and values take the back seat.
Two more such companies offered her the same kind of job but she declined.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#476In BC we regularly get scams like missed delivery, order confirmation for something expensive, or your social insurance number will get cancelled. These are such an annoyance that I started making it into a game instead.
They mostly target the Chinese population, which in bc is quite large, and I'm assuming are ran from China. Each of the calls end with a "press 1 for English and 2 for Chinese". If you choose 1 the line hangs. If you choose 2 you get a Chinese person on the line. Sometimes the message is directly in Chinese and you need to guess the right key. I programmed some diatribe in Chinese in Google translate from my bookmarks toolbar.
Once in a while I get an Indian call center, mostly pretending to be Amazon with an order for an iPhone, which then veers into "someone stole your identity". If you reply with a younger voice, they hang. If I make an old person's voice, they stay with me. The more lost I sound, the harder the catch. I'm playing at keeping them on the line the longest time possible. It's fun cause they employ a few traps like asking for your birthdate then your age, or asking for some piece of information like your SIN a few times to validate you don't BS them. My backstory is getting better and better. It's kind of like beating a boss everytime you pass one.
Nowadays I'm excited when I receive one, because I get to play. But it's only a matter of time before my parents get trapped
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would happen if the American companies just started playing hardball? For example, what if they required that contracts with foreign telephone companies had a fee based on scams detected as coming through and just refused to work with any company that wouldn't agree to those terms? I have no idea if that exact idea would make sense or even be possible to implement, but my thinking is that in many cases the Ameri…
The FCC has ordered American phone companies to drop traffic from known spam conduit phone companies. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-global-uc-robocall-m... Hopefully this will tighten the noose and make robocall traffic radioactive.
I may be too cynical, but I can't help but assume that none of them will actually follow through with this unless/until someone gets actually sanctioned for not doing this in a significant way (i.e. something that costs them more than they make from not doing so).
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#478Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#479I 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?
PaybackTony, I would also love to hear your suggestions (not sarcastically).
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
wasn't there a language created/designed specifically to be an international replacement, but was universally laughed at as a response?
Esperanto
yes, that's the one. i remember the first time reading about it and thought Klingon or Elvish would have been a better choice, but alas, i'm not a linguist