I'm genuinely curious as to why this isn't a problem in Europe. I live in the Netherlands and no one I know has ever received even a single call.
What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?
What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?
Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take longer, and often require documentation, especially for geographic area codes.
I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls simply isn't feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to be from 'real' numbers in countries where the scammers are safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.
VoIP rates to call a euro mobile number can be $$$. Meanwhile in Canada, it's the same cost as a landline, and available for fractions of a cent to any nobody like me.
I imagine part of the reason it's not a bigger problem in Europe is not a lot of people speak Dutch/German/etc. in the countries where these scammers are often calling from. They all speak English though.
There are a lot of French speakers in the world in poor economic conditions. Probably proportionately more than English. But it's still not as bad as English calls in North America.
(In Canada, I just respond in broken French to these calls, any official call would be able to transfer me to a French speaking (and 99.9% certainly bilingual attendant)).
I imagine that voice actors in German would be less useful because answering often yields a clearly non North American accent person clearly complicit in whatever scam is being attempted
So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this regard contributes to us being the victims here.
Edit: I hadn't RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto warranty scams. Second theory: lots of Americans are living below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky/expensive relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.
It's incredibly lucrative and has cost this country tens of billions of dollars a year for at least a couple decades. I wish more was done about it.
It's expensive to call EU cellphones. In the US people are billed to receive calls (of course these days people usually have unmetered calling but the legacy of cellphone numbers not costing any more to call than a landline continues).
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coa...
Setting up a business in Europe (for example in the Netherlands) requires significant paperwork. In the US, it's done in a few seconds. In the US, it requires years of court proceedings or (in this case) government agency investigation to shut down a business. (No idea how long that takes in Europe, but I hope your governments are more powerful than this.)
Regulation can be a good thing.
You can work around it of course but this ultimately reduces the profitability of the scams, so better due diligence around companies still fights scams by making it less profitable.
It being hard to start a business in Europe means that they are not as innovative, but they also miss out on many scams.
I ask because I wonder if the US has unmaintained 20 year old hardware and software builds on it, since Lucent seems to have vanished around then. I mean that I wonder if spammers are taking advantage of unmaintained software, or naive antiquated laws, or both.