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Comment by bbbbb5 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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