Rather than "caused by illegal Indian call centres in 2022", wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Indian industrial-scale criminal scam operations"?
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Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
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Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#72Just get a job where you have to pick up every call you get and some of them won’t be spam!
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#73Set your phone to silence unknown callers. Completely eliminated the issue for me, along with any other random goofball trying to call me.
This "solution" and mindset completely undermines the utility of a phone. Which at least I think is a grave mistake. You might argue that you barely use the phone as a phone, and that might have been a good argument if there was anything remotely equivalent.
Basically blaming the victim, ain't it? The fault is squarely with the carriers.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#74Set your phone to silence unknown callers. Completely eliminated the issue for me, along with any other random goofball trying to call me.
Just hope your life partner doesn’t lock themselves out of the house and try to call you from a polite strangers phone.
I use voicemail for that, I still get alerts for a new voicemail, and often the scam calls will just move on when there isn't an answer, or you can listen and it's pretty easy to tell if it's legitimate
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just accept the collateral damage of never answering calls. Traditional telephone service is dead to anyone under 40.
Anyone under 40, who have no kids, don’t run a business, have no presence in the community, and socialize only with people under 40.
Pretty sure that’s actually a significant amount of people.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#76These 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.
> These operations have to be sponsored by the state at this scale.
I'd argue that one such state is the U.S.
Congress could pretty trivially order that carriers give each customer a choice about what kinds of spoofed / unreliable-origin calls to let through.
E.g.: For calls originating (inside | outside) the U.S.: (allow-all | allow-whitelist-only | allow-only-when-presenting-callee-issued-passcode | etc.)
But Congress doesn't do this.
This isn't exactly Congress sponsoring this behavior, but I suspect there's some bribery and/or unsavory lobbying going on.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#77[flagged]
Absolute ignorance followed by absolute arrogance. Classic!
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#78It'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?
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#79To everyone suggesting to silence unknown callers, most of these scams come through email or text messages, and the victim is tricked into calling the scammer.
Best defense: don’t ever call a phone number you receive in a text or email message. Delete the message and look up your bank’s, Amazon’s, or PayPal’s phone number yourself through the company’s official web site.
Also, don’t get scared by messages about your finances…stay calm. The scammers count on you getting freaked out and doing something stupid.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#80I find that a majority of our incoming calls are scams. Surprised that Google/Apple haven’t fixed this at the behest of the government.
Our phone provider has a free service, Call Control, that’s completely eliminated scam calls. Callers get an automated message asking them to enter a random number. If they enter it correctly, my phone rings as usual. This system foils automated calling services, at least for now.
The problem with services like this is that some automated calls are legitimate.