Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You tackle these things one-obstacle-at-the-time. Telco's are borderline complicit in this today, they don't have to be. Note that in some countries these scams are far more prevalent than in others, they'll go for the low hanging fruit first just like any other business. Make it harder and definitely there will be a response and then you aim to tackle that one. Shipping a SIM box would already be much more work than just changing a number in a database. Require that a phone number is used in the country of origin before you allow it to roam is another step in that process and so on. Rome wasn't built in a day and I'm sure that getting rid of this problem is going to be a series of steps.

But as long as telcos willingly cooperate and allow remote call centers to basically pick any number in the locality of the recipient even though that number is not currently roaming in India they are making things much worse.

View on HN

> Note that in some countries these scams are far more prevalent than in others, they'll go for the low hanging fruit first just like any other business

The reason for this is language barriers, it's not some countries doing things better than others.

> Shipping a SIM box would already be much more work than just changing a number in a database

They don't even actually need to ship one, there are thousands of them operational already. This is a massive industry.

Even if you cracked down hard on SIM boxes, the scammers will just purchase routing from botnets. This won't really impact their costs, and will be essentially impossible to take any meaningful action against.

Yes, but that would at least put them at the same level as burner phones with a physical presence required in the target country (or close to it).

Anyway, since you are willing to shoot down each and every suggestion in this thread short of rolling over and accepting the damage how would you tackle it?

Can you give a single example of similar fraud being successfully tackled? Not just the scammers being caught, but the entire scam being rendered unprofitable.

European authorities haven't managed to do anything about the car selling scams Romanians have been running for decades now. Nobody has managed to do anything about the Nigerian prince scams. BEC with truly shitty phishing pages keeps on growing and growing.

The best bet would be for US authorities to force India to crack down on these activities and prevent these scams from operating at an industrial scale.

The actions you propose would work well to address lower return activities, such as marketing robocalls. They can not work to address high-return scams.

If we can make it harder to run a scam call business by changing things on our end, and these changes do not impede non-fraudulent use, why not go for it?

I don’t see why you’re pushing so hard against this line of reasoning, I guess. You’re making it sound like a hopeless endeavor to even try, in a “don’t lock your doors because thieves will just use lock picks” kind of way.

> If we can make it harder to run a scam call business by changing things on our end

How much harder? If your changes increase the telephony costs of a scam call centre from 0.001% of revenue to 0.002%, you have not actually made their operations harder.

> and these changes do not impede non-fraudulent use, why not go for it?

Because these changes would not be free.

> Can you give a single example of similar fraud being successfully tackled?

Plenty of such cases here locally. Your point about the language barrier is on the money though, I never really gave that much thought but the number of Dutch speakers in India is most likely so low and the market so small that it isn't worth a massive campaign to them. Especially not if there are millions of gullible people in markets that are more accessible to them.

As for forcing Indian authorities: I've seen up close how corrupt things are there and I have very little hope that that would be a viable avenue to resolution of this problem.

> Plenty of such cases here locally.

I'd be super curious to hear about any local success stories.

>As for forcing Indian authorities: I've seen up close how corrupt things are there and I have very little hope that that would be a viable avenue to resolution of this problem.

Then you're left with education. These scams are very profitable and can easily afford resistance from telcos and banks.

Most of these scammers already have physical presence in the US. I feel the solution is probably to be found in more policing and prosecution than in creating tiny obstacles.

Maybe some lawsuits are in order. There might be a case to be made that theft is occurring on these telco networks, and they should be held liable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com