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Once upon a time banning opium in your own country was an act of war. The bar was so low it’s practically meaningless.
Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
91–100 of 504 posts
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#92Earlier 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.
I have two kids, am self-employed (tutoring) in my community, and have many friends and acquaintances are over 40 (from church, for instance). Sending unknown numbers to voicemail has been completely fine in every case. I've never missed an urgent call that I couldn't call right back after I read the voicemail transcription.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also caused me to completely miss an appliance delivery because the driver called me from his personal cell, I forgot I had "unknown callers" filtered, and he gave up when he couldn't reach me. Even though I get way more spam calls than legitimate calls, I realized that fully half of the legitimate calls I get are from numbers not in my contacts: delivery drivers, doctors offices, restaurants confirming reservations,…
There must be a technological solution to this problem ...
There is --- see my post above.
Mobile phones just don't offer it by default --- the best most have is a "Do not disturb" setting.
There is a marketing opportunity here for some software developer --- lots of people would actually *pay* for a mobile app that could effectively weed out auto-dialers and/or selectively send only unknown callers directly to voice mail without ringing the phone.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#94I 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?
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#95The problem is these scams are cheap to run and the risk is very low for the people running them. The police rarely do anything except a token show to arrest a few call centers full of low-level scammers. Rarely are the kingpins ever arrested and as such they just pop new centers up as often as they go down.
A multi-factoral approach may be the best:
1. Sanction India to encourage the government to clean up it's police force and go after these scammers with prejudice. Not the call centers, the kingpins that run them.
2. Education. Run commercials on every TV stations, news stations, etc to educate people on this. Perhaps even including example calls. Run TV shows talking about the scammers and examples of them successfully bullying people into paying to build deep distrust of these people and allow people's pattern-matching brains to do the rest of the work.
3. Punishing call forwarding services for every scam call. Force them to implement deep KYC under threat of severe company-ending fines.
4. Find a way to "encourage" carriers to improve their services to terminate these calls before they even make it to the customer.
I get so many telemarketing and scam calls to my phone anymore I have to pay $100/year for a service to stop about 80% of them. This is unacceptable. I'm not alone, I would guess in a survey of the average American their cell phone is basically useless as a calling device these days.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#96I find that a majority of our incoming calls are scams. Surprised that Google/Apple haven’t fixed this at the behest of the government.
Google had a perfect solution for this, Google Voice (formerly Grand Central). This amazing product was languishing for years due to the lack of attention on Google side. They don't let it die, but it doesn't look like they let it live, either. Shame, could be a total game changer.
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#97These 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.
How so?
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#98My 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
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also caused me to completely miss an appliance delivery because the driver called me from his personal cell, I forgot I had "unknown callers" filtered, and he gave up when he couldn't reach me. Even though I get way more spam calls than legitimate calls, I realized that fully half of the legitimate calls I get are from numbers not in my contacts: delivery drivers, doctors offices, restaurants confirming reservations,…
It's a delivery. Couldn't he have knocked on your door?
If you're home working with noise cancelling headphones on chances are you might not hear it
Re: Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
#100It'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?
Lucky you. I usually get one or two spam calls a day in Europe (France/Germany) but they are marked as spam.
Bless the people keeping that red list up to date.
This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.