UN says Asian scam call center epidemic expanding globally amid political heat Scam call centers are metastasizing worldwide "like a cancer," according to the United Nations, which warns the epidemic has reached a global inflection point as syndicates scale up and spread out. Recent crackdowns in East and Southeast Asia - where scam centers took root at industrial scale - have coincided with organized …
Most of this is not Chinese government managed, and at least some of it is specifically opposed by them. There are plenty of people in China who have access to the money needed to fund and manage a criminal enterprise like this, and there's been some agglomeration from historical successes, but scam networks are international. Even if China did have the ability to cut off all Chinese nationals running such things, it wouldn't stop the many others who would take over the infrastructure they've already set up and continue to grow it. China doesn't have many tools that can't already be used by our own countries, which mostly involves doing police work until you find where they've set up a facility and convincing the host country, which is almost never China, to go in and shut it down, then repeating hopefully fast enough that it costs them more to make a new one than they gain from it.
Worth listening to Scam Inc. if you can. This industry is yet another unpredicted consequence of COVID. Triad gangs ran the gambling operations in Macau. When COVID struck, they needed another way to make money fast, and they hit on scamming. The gangs don't operate in China - the article makes it pretty clear where their bases are. China and the Chinese government are no more responsible for this than Italy is for the New York mafia. In fact, the biggest victims of these gangs have been Chinese.
The psychology of scamming is fascinating. Individuals who have themselves been trafficked/scammed/kidnapped use their own skills to convince other people to part with their money seemingly with such ease. At some point, there'll be a tipping point where the number of savvy enough people to avoid scams is so high that it isn't worth the bother. At least that's one scenario.
The trouble with that is that the criminals devise ever more sophisticated scams, using ever more sophisticated technology. It's going to get to the point where you can only trust what you directly see and hear, and sooner or later, even that might be in doubt.
The true crunch will come when all this leads to more enshittification of everything. It'll get harder and harder to do the things we used to have to do "the long way round" anyway. AI will require more and more energy in both making the scams and defending people against scams, which will drive up prices of those things that are being protected.
I don't see this ending well.
"number of savvy enough people to avoid scams"
Not sure that will ever happen. In the news the other day, some guy in the UK fell foul to a romance scammer and lost £80,000. He was complaining the bank didn't try hard enough to stop him sending the money to the scammer (a woman he'd never even met in real life or even seen on Zoom etc; she didn't exist). So despite the huge publicity around romance scams and banks giving warnings about such transfers abroad, there are still people falling head over heels for them.
It's not surprising that these romance scams happen when some of the online dating sites are so lax about profile creation. At least one of the main ones has obviously-dodgy profiles appearing all the time; there is seemingly no moderation of new accounts. And that's just the obvious ones - there are doubtless many less-obvious ones too.
People who are aware of scams are the ones more likely to be scammed. Here is a study about that.
"People who are aware of scams are the ones more likely to be scammed".
Or it could also possibly be that people who are aware of scams are more likely to admit to being scammed? Barring a double blind study where a random sample of the population is subjected to a simulation of a scam, we don't know how big the proportion of the scam victims don't admit to it. I don't believe for one minute that a bunch of students is a representative sample of the general population.
I don't think that sort of study would pass a check with an ethics board for some reason though....
"The true crunch will come when all this leads to more enshittification of everything. It'll get harder and harder to do the things we used to have to do "the long way round" anyway. AI will require more and more energy in both making the scams and defending people against scams, which will drive up prices of those things that are being protected."
We are already well on the way - just look at the widespread use of MFA. It's an absolute pain in the arse - we get more helpdesk calls about it not working properly for some reason or another than we do about any other single issue. But in the current security landscape, it is absolutely necessary to use it.
Seems like having Caller ID that actually works and isn't spoofable would put a stop to this pretty quick. Also seems like it wouldn't be that hard to implement - just use the ANI numbers instead of the self-reported Caller ID. If there's no ANI (like overseas VOIP), put a star in front of the number, as an indicator that the Caller ID very likely is fake.
Then add some enforcement teeth:
1. Set up a new *__ number (like *69) to report a call as spam/scam.
2. Every use of that number, beyond a certain base value ('cos there will always be a few that slip through), incurs a $1 fine for the end-user's telco. (That adds up quick!)
3. The end-user's telco can bill the telco that transferred the call to them for any calls that had fines. (And that one can bill the telco that transferred to them, etc.)
4. A telco can refuse to take incoming calls from other telcos, especially if they won't pay the fines or have lots of unverified Caller ID.
So, if telco 1 is getting a lot of scam calls (as marked by their customers) from telco 2, and telco 2 won't pay the fines, then telco 1 stops accepting calls from telco 2. They would probably also stop if a substantial number of incoming calls from telco 2 don't have verifiable Caller ID. Wouldn't be long before the telco of the scammers can't connect to anybody else - and scam calls drop dramatically.
Yep, would hurt VOIP companies that don't vet their customers or enforce accurate Caller ID. Sounds like a good thing.
Who answers calls from their "bank" or whatever based on called ID? Call your bank back instead.
More importantly, why are legitimate companies even calling their customers from a call centre these days? Use a more secure channel.
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