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Comment by corentin88 | Hacker News Reader

You would just get called from an agent (bot) based in your country. There’s no easy way to prevent that. Fraud is massive and it’s becoming cheaper and easier to run at scale.

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China has much stricter control over phone #'s and identities than USA/EU does. It's much more difficult for me to create a placeholder digital identity in China. I wouldn't love that solution, but it exists.

As a result, it's very difficult for me to use a lot of Chinese websites and it's a pretty sizable barrier to hardware development when Chinese citizens can just download the relevant datasheet off some Chinese forum in 5 minutes, but I have to sign NDA's with western companies or figure out how to WeChat a Chinese OEM to send me their datasheets.

I swear it's harder for us to access Chinese sites than it is for them to VPN to outside services. There's one event I was looking at going to in China but the announcements/chat was on QQ which as far as I can tell is just impossible to access.

Then when it gets reported the authorities can just look up the owner of that number and arrest them. Vs overseas based operations that are difficult to follow up on.

The authorities already don’t have much leverage over “domestic” spam call centers that are actually located overseas but somehow always manage to acquire domestic numbers to call from.

A couple of years ago Australia had a big reform of the laws where sms providers / voip companies had to actually verify their users owned the numbers they send from. Anecdotally before then I was getting a scam text message every day, now I haven’t had one in years.

Phone numbers in Australia are also all tied to ID. If there is a will to fix the system, it can be done.

Good now we only need to get 100% of sovereign nations and rogue states to adopt uniform global treaties

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