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Sometimes they transfer to a cryptocurrency exchange, sometimes they go to a branch to withdraw everything. Banks don't really like either of those, so issuing checks and cashing them somewhere else is a common scheme.

Some may bounce the money through a few accounts and eventually into a business account that'll send it overseas, it depends.

The people on the ground are random replaceable idiots.

Lots of telcos are doing exactly this, doesn't really work very well. The spammers just switch to more generic messages you can't realistically filter out.

> You're correct that some of the scams yield hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like I said, I knew someone to whom that happened. However, most scammers look for smaller payouts in quantity. Think of ransomware that make it look like your computer is full of viruses just so they can "sell" the uninstaller for a few hundred bucks.

Those are the exact scammers who will get you to install teamviewer/anydesk and use it to empty your bank account, with the $100 charge just working as a distraction. You can find videos showing how these scams work on youtube.

Of course lots of people won't have $100k or even $10k in their bank account, the scammers will just send those people out to buy gift cards or similar instead of wasting their drop accounts.

Even if only one in 1000 calls returns $100k, they're still averaging $100 per call.

PaybackTony literally said "It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing." and went on to explain how calling in EU is much more expensive. I think it's safe to assume that he just didn't think this through.

>Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of what they said.

It's not defaming the OP. I did address the merit of what they said.

> If it takes 2,000 calls to find one victim, and you're paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend $200 per victim.

Yes, but in reality it takes less than 10 calls to find one victim.

> Will you make that much back, and will it be enough to offset all of the other costs involved in trolling?

These scammers are pulling hundreds of thousands from individual victims. Even at the low end they're earning thousands.

These scams are so profitable that you can't increase costs of calling enough to stop them while also keeping phone calls accessible to normal people.

>Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal

Most of the losses (in $ terms) from these scams do not involve gift cards. They involve the scammers convincing you to install some remote desktop software and emptying your bank account.

It's already illegal to send people to open bank accounts with fake IDs, but the scammers have no problem cashing out the bulk of their profits like that.

Yeah, and this is almost the bottom of the food chain, the only people below crimemarket are those too dumb to use internet forums.

Anyone can easily buy European bank accounts opened with fake IDs, or money laundering services where you're provided an IBAN and receive a % of the money sent there to your cryptocurrency wallet.

Want a fake passport good enough to travel with? No problem, will just run you a 1000 euros.

> 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.

> 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.

Have you seen how elaborate schemes small players on sites like crimemarket.is engage in for their scams?

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.

And what do you propose would be such a reasonable rate limit?

>However, even if we assume that SIM boxes are a magic solution to carrier interventions, that still raises the cost from the current status-quo. Implement enough of these barriers and the entire scam operation becomes unprofitable and no longer worthwhile.

Why do you assume that the call routing is a meaningful cost to these operations? For all we know they spend less than 0.01% of their revenue on call routing.

No, the SIM boxes live in the US.

> 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.

How would this affect the profits?

Using SIM boxes is already standard practice, sketchy VOIP providers and SMS spammers have been doing for years because it is cheaper to do this than to pay for legitimate routing.

Just put something along the lines of "sim box grey route" into Google and you'll find loads of relevant industry materials.

Besides, you're drastically moving the goalposts here. We went from "could put a stop to this" to minor obstacles.

No they can't. The scammers will just hire a random person from indeed/monster/whatever, ship them a SIM box and tell them to fill it with prepaids.

> It's not taking place this year: https://events.ccc.de/category/37c3/#no-congress-2022-en

What's this hygiene stuff they're talking about? Did they get in trouble with the venues over attendees not showering or something?

Why would they not be against subjecting their citizens to such a mass surveillance system?

I think central London is actually a pretty great place to drive if you can afford it.

Westminster council doesn't tow, so you never have to look for a parking spot.

Unlike some other European cities, the odds of being harassed by police while driving are essentially non-existent. Your car can be registered in Serbia and you won't be constantly pulled over and harassed like you would be in Germany, Netherlands, France or Spain.

I even spent a month driving around without any registration plates and nobody said anything (they had been stolen, I had to physically go collect new ones from another country).

Why not just write "raidforums"? (But no, that forum has been down for 8 months)

>This is a seller that had “100% perfect” transactions.

Won't save them, eBay will close their account after a couple of disputes like yours.

Except if your car is registered in one of the wrong countries, then you might spend hours getting controlled on Schengen internal borders.

Of course, if your car isn't registered in an Eastern European country you probably won't even know that this is a possibility.

This seems like an example of a scam not working on eBay.

The executive branch essentially works for the congress, what's the issue here?

If your goal is to transmit something to a device within the same room, sure.

This is the first one that's actually a bad look for Twitter, the rest were a lot of noise over nothing.

The thing about this kind of vague insinuations is that they're impossible to refute, but not necessarily impossible to show examples of. Do you have any?

Do you have evidence of this being a thing, or is this just a baseless conspiracy theory?

The Congress is obviously a completely different entity than the FBI.

If the Congress wants to force companies work with the FBI, they have the absolute power to do so.