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Comment by linhns | Hacker News Reader

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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

Yeah, they spoof local numbers. I haven't lived in the city my area code is from in a long time. Occasionally I'll answer calls from there when I'm bored and it's always a scammer.

What's even more disturbing is that I'm now getting calls from people talking in Hindi. I answer in English but they ask me to switch to Hindi. (I'm from Pakistan and speak Urdu which is mutually intelligible with Hindi). I'm guessing it's to build familiarity/trust.

They want to pay off my phone, electric and other bills and in return I pay them 50% of the amount. I give them fake info and try to keep them on as long as possible... asking them to repeat multiple times. Sometimes I'll tell how thankful I am that they came to me with this 50% off offer because I'm facing financial troubles. Not once did any of them fell bad about trying to scam a poor person. Their response is usually something like "This is exactly why we are offering this service, to help people like you".

Eventually they get frustrated and hangup. This way I can hurt their ROI just a bit.

Shaken/stir isn’t a panacea however: https://transnexus.com/blog/2022/shaken-statistics-november/

Due to that whole lack of authentication I. The phone system, we get lots of spoofed numbers here in the US. I ignore most unknown calls but manage to answer maybe one a month that is an obvious foreign (usually Indian sounding) call center.

USA carriers should probably just block them like they do almost every Chinese phone number.

There's no meaningful blocking here: the victimizing party is spoofing, or using a "legitimate" forwarding service. Carriers could just cut India off entirely, but (1) money finds a way, and (2) we're going to cut off service for a democratic country of over a billion people because of a few scammers?

The remediation here needs to be statutory: (1) anti-spoofing needs to happen at the carrier level and not just the terminating connection, and (2) forwarding services need to be subjected to additional oversight and transparency requirements.

$10 Billion is not just a few scammers. That is an unfathomably huge industry.

I can certainly fathom $10 billion. But I take your point; my point was that, even if there are a million criminals involved in telephone fraud in India, it's a tiny fraction of overall (and primarily legitimate!) telephone traffic. Interfering with over a billion peoples' ability to talk with their loved ones requires existential damage to our country, not frustrating crime that's best resolved with international cooperation.

Edit: I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft: nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn't somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don't see the same kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet.

[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

> I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft: nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn’t somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don’t see the same kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet.

Cutting F500s off the internet would do nothing about wage theft. There is considerable advocacy for strong action to bring wage theft under control, too. So, I’d say this analogy fails its purpose on multiple levels.

I think Americans feel differently about a domestic issue of Americans stealing from Americans than they do about a developing country scamming elderly Americans out of their social security income.

It's never an "Indian number," it always appears to originate locally or in the US. Either way, I just use good hygiene and ignore all outside calls unless on contact list. The only people who ever need to call me are family and PagerDuty.

The trick is to get a random number from a place in the US that you don’t know anyone and then ignore numbers that are too similar.

I think most people are downvoting you because this advice is useless, given that those calls never come from Indian phone numbers. I'd like to note that I'm downvoting you because that's not what a tautology is.

This is a good joke because numbers came from India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_s...

Absolute ignorance followed by absolute arrogance. Classic!

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