I worked on countering phone scams and robocalls at the Federal Communications Commission for over a year. This operation was a big win and an impressive international collaboration.<p>That said, the robocall problem is getting worse, not better. Robocall volume is at an all-time high: <a href="https://robocallindex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://robocallindex.com/</a><p>In many respects, the problem of telephone spam today is similar to the problem of email spam in the early 2000s. Litigating against spammers had limited efficacy, so the community developed blacklists, better filtering, and stronger authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC).<p>Until the major carriers get serious about similar steps, especially filtering and authentication (i.e. SHAKEN and STIR), these fraudulent calls won't stop. And, in the interim, vulnerable populations will continue to be disproportionately victimized.
<i>Two other conspirators in Illinois were sentenced in February to between two years to just over four years for conspiracy, and a third person in Arizona was given probation in a plea agreement, it said.</i><p>Sounds like the Prisoner’s Dilemma paid off for that third person.
Kitboga, over on Twitch[1], frequently livestreams the experience of talking to people executing IRS scams. Among other types of computer scams like "unlock your computer for X dollars," it's fascinating to listen in on the tactics used to prey on unassuming victims.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga" rel="nofollow">https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga</a>
I am so happy to see some of these predators get caught. A former coworker, a very smart but also very naive network engineer from the middle east, was hooked by these people shortly after immigrating. They said they were the US government and that he would be immediately deported if he didn't cooperate. He ending up sending them $30,000 if I recall correctly. :(
Don't know if this is the same group, but it's pretty cathartic to watch<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzedMdx6QG4" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzedMdx6QG4</a>
> <i>2 contractors in India involving five call centers in Ahmedabad, a city in western India, have been indicted on wire fraud, money laundering and other conspiracy charges as part of the operation, the department said. They have yet to be arraigned, it said.</i><p>Is there any realistic chance of Indian law enforcement catching up with these guys?
I wonder why this isn't a problem in Europe, at least I haven't heard of anything like it. Is it because Indians don't speak German/French/Spanish/etc.? Or is the American phone system somehow worse than the European?
Nice to see some great cooperation with all those groups.<p>>“hundreds of millions” of dollars<p>I guess I'm not scamming anyone out of anything but if I was and got a million.... I like to think I'd be smart enough to burn everything and enjoy...
I've been pestered several times a day with the "last chance to lower your credit card rates" phone scam. I finally hit on a solution. I press 1 to speak to a representative, I get a human, then I follow their script until it gets to the "what's your credit card number" question.<p>I say I have to go look for it. So I randomly make noises like opening doors, closing drawers, shuffling papers. I had one on the line for 10 minutes before he gave up.<p>After a couple doses of "the treatment", they stop calling. Blessed relief!<p>This method works because it costs them human time. Just hanging up on their robot, or their human, doesn't work. They just call again.
I had an old landline number ported to Google Voice about 10 years ago. Now, 90% of the calls on that number are spam. Anything marked as spam in Google Voice still passes through to the Hangouts app. Google has done the most supremely crap job with Hangouts and Google Voice integration. Hey let's passthrough spam to the app <i>and</i> have no search function!<p>Hilariously quite a lot of calls are "Google SEO" related, scammy sounding credit offers, and political donation solicitations.
A lot of the Indian scammers have moved on to pretending to be the CRA (Canada revenue agency), the Canuck version of the IRS. Toronto and Vancouver area codes are plagued by robodialers connecting to fake cra scam call centers. Canada has a lot less resources than the US to spend manpower investigating and building cases with the Indian law enforcement agencies.
A friend lost a significant amount of money to what could have been this scam. The MO fits (posing as the IRS, threatening with arrest/deportation, collecting payments via gift cards).<p>The article mentions restitution. Does anyone know how he could find out if he's eligible?
Business idea: shared phone assistants. Whenever someone calls your number, the assistant answers only "hello?", they have to speak to your assistant and ask for you by name and/or passphrase to be connected to you.<p>You can add some prestige to calling someone (having a human answering and screening your calls for you) at a pretty low cost (1 minute per call? 2-3 cheap workers could cover the whole biz, could share lines between ~ 50-100 people with distinct sounding names). eliminate all unsolicited calls for the customer.
I have just read some recent reports and complaints filed by people at <a href="http://www.whycall.me/631-318-6350.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.whycall.me/631-318-6350.html</a> about these IRS scams. I think people should have been really aware of such scams, because they have been around harassing us for years. We also need to keep spreading the words to everyone about this.
Dang, I liked wasting these guys time. My technique was to pause as long as possible while obviously stuffing my face with Cheetos and telling them hang on
> They chose their victims through information obtained from “data brokers” or from other sources, the department said.<p>Would be interesting to know more about this. In the legit call center business the phone numbers of people who have previously bought something are more valuable. The ability to target specific demographics is probably a prerequisite for a scam like this, calling randomly would be really expensive.
I rarely receive calls these days and when I receive, they are mostly scams or telemarketers, so I basically accept call from a small set of whitelist and drop the rest.<p>Most people who need to speak to me attempt to contact me via different means anyways. I don't have much faith they will ever fix PSTN that I'm dreaming for the day I can start ignoring all calls.
You know, this scam probably wouldn't have been as successful if the real IRS didn't behave like a bunch of shady scam artists themselves. Twice over the years, I've been sent very intimidating letters by the IRS claiming I owe back taxes on clearly erronous assumptions by them. These have both been cleared up by submitting documentation but I've had to spend a good chunk of time in doing so. I also cannot phone them directly, I must fax reams of personal info to some random fax number with no confirmation they even received it.<p>By the time I received the IRS letters, I typically had to respond within a matter of days or face additional penalties (what if I was on vacation). Even the most basic of cross checking my tax forms would have clearly shown everything was legit. And these were by no means unusual or complex tax situations, just very basic things that millions of Americans report on their taxes every year. But even though I knew everything was above board, the tax laws are so convoluted that I was in constant fear the IRS would still find some BS reason I owed them more money.
Good work, it's heartening to see that these institutions eventually work together. Hopefully this success can be replicated with scammers who have targets less directly interesting to the state.
- Call your phone provider, ask them to block all incoming international calls.<p>- Ask international callers to use an app instead.<p>I used to get calls every day and after doing this it stopped.