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

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

#481

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 4:56 AM UTC

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #442

matthewmorgan wrote: post #98

My grandfather stopped answering his landline telephone because of these scumbags. Kitboga is a youtuber who winds scammers up and wastes their time, and is pretty righteous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNziOoXDBeg

There's a whole cottage industry of scam baiters. Harvey Dentt, Rinona Poison, Scambait Central, Lenny the robot (much less active of late), and quite a few others. Many of them use voice filters to sound elderly, or to change genders. It seems like a lot of the scammers are getting frustrated, constantly trying to figure out if you're Kitboga, etc. A vital service that is educating the public while providing rich en…

@Scambaiter on YouTube is excellent, as he uses technical knowledge to actually hack and disrupt call centers.

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

#482

Post by dartharva » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

potamic wrote: post #246

frontman1988 wrote: post #213

Is it bad that I don't feel sorry for the Americans getting scammed given the obscene wealth inequality that exists between the two countries? Some wealth shifting to a poor country with millions of malnourished people might actually be a net positive to the world? Morality is complicated for sure.

It's not bad, it's reprehensible. Notwithstanding the fact that there are about a dozen moral qualms about this line of thinking, the economic conditions of the countries have little bearing on the economic situations of individuals in this interaction. I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming. And given their criminal backgrounds, they are likely to do more harm tha…

> I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming

Ohohoho noo they're not. They are definitely not. Probably the one sitting at the top, but not the telecallers themselves who do the actual fieldwork. These are just poor youngsters who can't find jobs because of how ridiculously brutal India's labour market is.

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

#483

Post by dartharva » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 6:09 AM UTC

I'm just gonna be that guy - just install Truecaller. It has been the singular line of defense against all scammers and spammers for most (almost all) people in India and it works wonderfully. Scammers/spammers get routinely identified and blacklisted using crowdsourced information, and with terrific speed and prejudice. I do believe the reason most scammers have started focusing on foreign victims instead is because Truecaller has made it nigh impossible for them to dupe Indians at scale.

Yes, they have the bad habit of scooping off your contact lists to index people without consent, and, on hindsight, is indeed an affront to telephone privacy, but its benefits outweigh those compromises enough.

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

#484

Post by EchoReflection » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

ligerzer0 wrote: post #427

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 ?

Someone very close to me recently got scammed by someone calling from a fake Wells Fargo fraud prevention phone number

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

#485

Post by Diesel555 » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 7:33 AM UTC

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.

You are confusing economists with politicians. I can point you to many conservative economists who recommend good policy - whether or not that is implemented is a different story. Economists are advisors, not decision makers, in this context.

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

#486

Post by potamic » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 10:04 AM UTC

frontman1988 wrote: post #306

potamic wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bad, it's reprehensible. Notwithstanding the fact that there are about a dozen moral qualms about this line of thinking, the economic conditions of the countries have little bearing on the economic situations of individuals in this interaction. I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming. And given their criminal backgrounds, they are likely to do more harm tha…

If only Gandhi's idealism was even somewhat practical. This is what he thought about the Jews: “Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.” Th…

Gandhi might've said a lot of things, but the point of that quote is that retaliation leads to an overall worse outcome. Unless you're an egomaniac, you will want to swallow your pride, break the chain of retaliation and live your life in peace. Retaliation is an inherently unstable state.

You are right that people are only as good as the world allows them to be. Which brings us to morality. It is not about any greater good or anything like that. Morality is simply what the world has defined that allows people to be. Over time humanity has understood a set of ideas that allow a stable society to exist. Without these you will have a very dysfunctional society that is in a perpetual state of retaliation. The wise founders of nations have realized this and codified morals into law. There is no society today that exists without law because any such society would not have stood the test of time.

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

#487

Post by potamic » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 10:06 AM UTC

dartharva wrote: post #482

potamic wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bad, it's reprehensible. Notwithstanding the fact that there are about a dozen moral qualms about this line of thinking, the economic conditions of the countries have little bearing on the economic situations of individuals in this interaction. I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming. And given their criminal backgrounds, they are likely to do more harm tha…

> I'd wager that the scammers here are more wealthy than most of the people they are scamming Ohohoho noo they're not. They are definitely not. Probably the one sitting at the top, but not the telecallers themselves who do the actual fieldwork. These are just poor youngsters who can't find jobs because of how ridiculously brutal India's labour market is.

Obviously, when we talk about scammers we are talking about the ring leaders.

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

#488

Post by jonas-w » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 10:07 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #29

mensetmanusman wrote: post #15

I find that a majority of our incoming calls are scams. Surprised that Google/Apple haven’t fixed this at the behest of the government.

I believe both Android and iOS support SHAKEN/STIR, as long as your carrier supports it. On my phone, at least, I see Caller IDs tagged with "likely spam" if a check fails.

Samsung has their own proprietary thing i think [0].

But it is great, when someone calls and i don't have them in my address book they show me the name of them, for example the name of the doctor offices, companies etc. As you can see in the demo carousel on their page, it shows "SMART" next to it, which emphazises that this isn't a number in your contacts but fetched from the internet.

Or if they are likely spam, my whole display is red and i can immediately hang up.

[0] https://de.hiya.com/products-smart-call

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

#489

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 11:52 AM UTC

bbbbb5 wrote: post #462

mschuster91 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By absolute numbers, I do believe OP is correct. In Germany, we do have a problem with phone based scams as well, but since we have modern ways of transferring money (SEPA wire transfers / direct debit) and actually useful identity cards that make opening fake bank accounts for mules very difficult, almost all scams rely on personal contact instead - the most common scheme is fake policemen, where the callcenter will…

> actually useful identity cards It costs like 100 euros to buy a fake ID that'll work at any bank in Germany. This is a bizarre trope oft-repeated on HN by techies who think that banks actually verify chipped ID cards, they do not. And even if they did, they have to accept a plenty of EU IDs which do not have chips. Google and look at how a Greek ID card looks like, it's literally a piece of paper. > opening fake ba…

> It costs like 100 euros to buy a fake ID that'll work at any bank in Germany. This is a bizarre trope oft-repeated on HN by techies who think that banks actually verify chipped ID cards, they do not. And even if they did, they have to accept a plenty of EU IDs which do not have chips.

I'm not talking about the eID chip, that isn't verified indeed - but at least in my experience, when opening a bank account in person, they do diligent checks, for non-German cards they even have a database how different nations' ID cards should look like and what the security markings are.

Video-Ident aka holding your ID card into your webcam is indeed vulnerable, and banks like N26 got in really hot water, which forced them to ramp up their anti-fraud measures to a degree even legitimate customers got massively impacted [1].

> On the same forum you will find people selling Kleinanzeigen accounts, and DHL insiders creating fake tracking IDs for Kleinanzeigen scams.

Yes, dark markets exist. But their scale, still, is vastly lower than the US, where you have shit like virtually all Americans' information being sold online that is necessary to open lines of credit and do other kinds of fraud. Stuff like tax refund scams or SSN's being abused by illegal immigrants simply does not exist here (again: at least not at a relevant scale), because we have modern systems in place.

> This isn't true at all. Those scams happen, but they're the minority. You can search for "OB Cashing" on crimemarket, that's the term of art they use for calling up grandmothers and convincing them to empty their bank accounts.

The classic scams are the majority, and yet even these they yield the scammers only something like 13 million euros a year [2], that's laughable compared to the amount Americans lose, even if one assumes that only a tenth of the cases gets reported at all.

And again: entire classes of scams like "I got arrested and need bail money" or "I was involved in a traffic accident and need to pay the hospital cash advance for treatment" don't work here because we don't have cash bail or bills from hospitals and people know that. If you would try this scam on any European, they'd laugh you off because they know that this doesn't exist.

[1] https://www.golem.de/news/internetbetrug-so-sperrt-n26-im-ka...

[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/kriminalitaet-stuttgart...

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

#490

Post by tim333 » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 12:14 PM UTC

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).

We may be able to get good AIs to fight the bad AIs? I guess in this case something that pops up saying maybe call the grandson back?