10 ms·

Scammers gaming India’s overcrowded job market

124 points by kawera 9y ago

z3t4 9y ago
> “In Delhi, you can’t become an important man without pulling some kind of fraud,” This is not only a problem in India. We need to stop dealing with companies that have bad ethics or values, so that they go out of business. Do not work for them and do not do business with them. Sure you might lose money in the short run, but we all win in the end.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  It needs people to take a stand and I think that's what's lacking. Often the alternative is not starvation so desperation isn't always an excuse. Look, if everyone around you is a cynic, if everyone around you is saying you're a dummy for being an honest person, if everyone around you is saying 'this is the way things work around here', you need to be brave AND honest to push back against that. Most humans (anywhere) just follow.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    It is worse, consider officialdom in China where any highish official can be brought down for corruption at anytime. So if you are clean, you won’t get promoted, because your higher ups and peers can’t control you with that axe over your head. So ya, you can take a stand, but you aren’t going to go far enough in your career for the stand to make much of a difference, cynicism or not.
    - jimmywanger 9y ago
      Whereas if you can't be brought down for corruption, you will get promoted because you can pay your way off? China's policy is fairly sane. Nobody except for the inner circle of the party can take anything for granted. If you bribe somebody for advancement, if caught, both you and the person you bribe get brought down and punished. Probably a jail sentence, confiscation of any property that you might possibly have gotten through dishonest means, and in severe enough cases, death.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        China’s policy isn’t sane at all. The lack of rule of law means a prosecutor or judge just can’t go out and act on corruption complaints, the party is internally policing itself (you have to be expelled before prosecution is even possible). Who gets brought down for corruption often depends on who they are aligned with, not what they actually did. It’s like wild parking in Beijing, everyone with a car does it, only a very few are ever punished for it. Or the fact that there are brothels everywhere except during CCP congress meetings, law is selectively and conveniently enforced, not fairly at all.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- reallymental 9y ago
  Yes, but what happens when everyone is on the short run? People die in the hundreds in India everyday (52 Accidental, and 32 Un-Natural every hour [0]) These ARE due to the sheer population numbers, but you cannot ignore the fact that everyone is on a very quick race, you can run it and die in the process, or you can scam some guy with a bicycle/scooter/car/heli/jet and get there quicker + safer. [0] http://ncrb.nic.in/StatPublications/ADSI/ADSI2014/adsi-2014%20full%20report.pdf http://ncrb.nic.in/StatPublications/ADSI/ADSI2014/adsi-2014%...
Cenk 9y ago
Reply All has a great episode on a similar kind of scam: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/
- thesnooze 9y ago
  Thought of the same thing. The writer of the Guardian article is actually the journalist the podcasters consulted with in part 2.
reallymental 9y ago
edited: Some grammatical errors. Great read, and full of issues that are discussed on HN everyday. Also, not a new topic, the call centers have been on the decline for long, and for good reasons. > -today, young people from agricultural castes want to work in offices and not farms. I wondered what other options were open to them. > Poojary read it out to me in his best American accent, which he had perfected by the end of his first week. He insisted that I play along as the unwitting American. I'm South Indian, I didn't grow up there, but I can vouch for the condescending tone of Snigdha (the author of this piece). It's very much like how a condescending North Indian talks about a South Indian. And she's the 'educated' North Indian here talking to an 'un-educated' one. The condescension is palpable, and present throughout the piece. I have not read her other 2 pieces, but they're on similar topics, and I expect a similar tone. I'm not sure if it is a reflection of her distaste for the people in these highly questionable occupations, or just sprinkles of editorial hate. > “America is full of old people who live alone. They have no one to turn to if anything goes wrong.” I've heard many arguments about how its a cultural thing, old people in the west (more weighted towards N-America) are treated as a burden. A burden on the economy, a social burden (damn those annoying grandpa's and grandma's). Isn't that why the 401k and MediCare/MedicAid exist? (excluding the set of population that doesn't qualify for them) to pay them(selves) back for their 40+ years of service? I'd like to hear some fresh arguments/data on why they are treated as such. I'd be grateful to anyone who points me to more reading material on this topic. > “It’s very easy to scam Americans. They are very gullible.” It just becomes easier to exploit the opposite side if you just demean them a little. Americans are fat and stupid, the British choose to chew their crap food with their crap teeth, and don't get me started with those vodkaholic Russians. Why don't we go a bit further, dehumanise them, then you're off to war aren't you. I'm just pointing out the micro scale from which these sentiments can snowball, nothing more.
- urbanj 9y ago
  What the fuck are you talking about, you ignorant dalit. Learn to fucking read, bhenchod.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  the British choose to chew their crap food What, you don't like curry? :) (cue "no true Scotsman" vis-a-vis UK curry!)
0xmohit 9y ago
I guess that it can be partly attributed to the fact that Indians don't doubt anything even if it's too good to be true. A few years back a neighbor called upon us with his young son who had just completed his graduation. It turned out that wanted to seek my opinion on a job offer his son had received. His son had graduated from a tier-III institute in India; below average academically and all that. Apparently he received an email offering him a job in London, some 110K pounds/annum, all without an interview. I attempted to explain that it sounded fishy if not outright scam, but they weren't ready to listen. A couple of weeks later these guys told my Dad that the ones who offered the job were asking for money under some pretext or the other and that they've decided not to move ahead with it. ---- The scammers realize that people are desperate, gullible and keep on tricking people for years, even decades. Just like the Nigerian prince who was finally nabbed last week [0] after a couple of decades. [0] https://www.theroot.com/white-nigerian-prince-email-scammer-arrested-in-louis-1821658205 https://www.theroot.com/white-nigerian-prince-email-scammer-...
thisisit 9y ago
This is like the boiler room stuff from "Wolf of Wall Street". Unfortunately it is not reviled rather held in awe. One thing which is never talked about in these articles is the failure of Indian government (past and present) to find effective family planning policies. Population growth is through the roof and hence unemployment is huge. With not much left in terms of job prospects lot of people turn to shady stuff. And while the article makes a case for IRS and Microsoft scams, slowly these guys are running domestic scams too. Lot of people receive calls claiming to be from a particular bank/digital wallet company/phone provider. The victims are asked to share the OTP sent to their mobile for "verification". These OTPs are mainly for digital wallets. Once the scammers reset the password they withdraw or spend most of the money in the wallets.
- Retric 9y ago
  India only has a 1.2% population growth rate including an aging population (https://www.statista.com/statistics/254469/median-age-of-the-population-in-india/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/254469/median-age-of-the...) which is down from 2.2% in 1980 and well below it's ~7% GDP growth rate. They are simply dealing with the normal issues for a rapidly developing nation. Plus the new generation entering the work force is based on their population growth rate ~20 years ago.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    I am not sure what is the data source on statista but the last census happened in 2011: http://www.simplydecoded.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TH01_THERN_CENSUS_517537f.jpg http://www.simplydecoded.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TH01... The last decade was the only one where the population growth has slowed. And even then the growth was ~17% in 10 years.
    - ddrmaxgt37 9y ago
      17% over a decade works out to 1.58% every year
    - Retric 9y ago
valuearb 9y ago
Reminded me we hired an indian android developer (contractor) through a phone interview (in US). When “he” showed up for work, it wasn’t him. The contractor who actually showed up couldn’t answer the same questions.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  Had the same thing happen at a startup I was at. We had a .Net developer get hired. First week he showed up and was asked to do some remedial stuff like update some tables on a database and then refactor a few controllers in one of our apps. First day he sat at his desk browsing the internet all day. Second day, the senior dev asked if he needed help and by the third day he was bringing in several .Net programming books to try and help him. By the end of the week he was out. Both founders said they would only hire domestically from now on and do a better job of screening people.
  - fortythirteen 9y ago
    Hired a JavaScript developer who passed the technical interview via phone. The guy that showed up couldn't understand the syntax errors that were showing up in the console.
  - amrx101 9y ago
    Damn, I dont understand, didn't you guys have a final interview in person.
- reallymental 9y ago
  Oh the old bait and switch works very well for telephone interviews. Remove them ideally. Perhaps a solution to this could be to give the interviewee something that only he can give the interviewer back when they meet. Something that the interviewee cannot pass onto the 'real' candidate who will appear on the first day. On the other hand, fining the real candidate is the worst way possible, it has to be better than that. It can help prevent this attempt of 'baiting and switching' to a lesser competent candidate in the first place. The attitude should change from 'Oh I can give this test, I'll pass it for sure and you can pay me $X for it', to 'Screw that, they'll find out immediately that it wasn't me.'
known 9y ago
Sounds like an Organized Mafia
jondubois 9y ago
One of the first jobs I had was in a small call centre (doing cold calls). I had to read a script asking random people questions about their financial situation. I think it might have been a scam but I'm still not sure to this day; it just sounded like a standard insurance questionnaire but I don't know what they did with the answers that were collected. I got fired after 2 weeks because my conversion rates were not good enough. I think that these kinds of jobs are morally acceptable. You can't expect the poor to behave ethically while the rich are screwing them over 24/7. You can't have a fair society without some degree of chaos and allowing people to take matters into their own hands. If we accept capitalism, then we must accept all the nasty things that come with it. Many people pretend that capitalism is just a matter of rewarding intelligence over stupidity and hard work over laziness, but it's just as much about rewarding selfishness over selflessness, deception over honesty, short-term thinking over long-term thinking, etc...
- ryandrake 9y ago
  The rich are screwing over the poor, therefore it's morally acceptable to scam poor and middle class grandmothers out of their pensions? I guarantee it's not the wealthy elite that are being targeted by these scams.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    They're wealthy compared to the perpetrators of the crime. If the 'victims' understood the value of their money, then they would never give it to anyone over the phone even if threatened with jail. If someone wants to take my money, they'd probably have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
ryandrake 9y ago
I'm always shocked that these IRS scams ever work, let alone consistently enough to make them viable businesses. Someone with an Indian accent and really bad phone connection calls you up and tells you they are from the IRS and you need to pay them "taxes" with an Apple gift card, and people fall for this?? First off, the government will never contact you by phone. I thought everyone knew this but if not the FTC is here to remind you [1]. Second, even if they did, wouldn't you require some kind of written evidence before you paid? Third, Apple gift cards? Seriously??? I guess a fool and their money are soon parted, but this is a pretty unbelievable level of gullibility. 1: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2013/08/whos-calling-not-government https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2013/08/whos-calling-not-g...
- zolthrowaway 9y ago
  It's at least partially fear. Fear can get people to do crazy things. Combine this with the fact that many people are totally tech illiterate (think about some of the elderly who call their grandkids every time they need to check their email). I don't think it's very hard to see how something like this can happen.
  - Waterluvian 9y ago
    If you're on Hacker News, I'll bet that 99% of your country's population is less tech literate than you. It's too easy for us to enter that mindset of, "how could X ever be? It's so obvious!" My wife reminds me of this regularly =)
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      This one has nothing to do with tech though. It's just someone cold calling you, claiming to be from the government and asking for Apple gift cards. You don't need to be a tech wizard to understand that something is clearly amiss.
      - Waterluvian 9y ago
        That's true. I'm conflating tech literacy with some term I don't know. It's the drive to be skeptical and challenge information against a logical framework one has of the world. I would say that it is a part of what "tech literacy" is. I've also got family members who lack it entirely. It's rather bizarre to see someone affected so wholly by new information without knowing how to even challenge that information. "If X is true then why do we not see Y occur?" will usually be met with a shut-down in conversation and a bring-up of hostility.
yakt 9y ago
I find it strange that some recruiters close the hiring process only with telephonic interviews. May be they don't have any respect for their job and their organizations. It is not about the technique of hiring, it is the lazy unskilled people in the hiring team who don't care about the employee's career and the organizations growth. So they get what they deserve. May be if Facebook introduces a button for Add Employee, they will find it more convenient and browse Facebook and start clicking Add Employee after reviewing their profiles. LOL, So funny. Organization needs to pay attention and setup a hiring team who want to do a good job in the task at hand.
- pjc50 9y ago
  When employee turnover is extremely high and the job itself is a scam, it's not about telephonic screening. It's about scamming as many people as possible into working for the organisation. Quantity over quality.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  Using social media in hiring decisions is illegal in some states.
zacurry 9y ago
I once got caught up in one of these . I was young , poor and had failed in my engineering exams. I had no coding skills, but was hoping some company would pick me up based on my math skills and train me (that is what most MNCs in india like Infosys do). I was attending different tech job fairs, but would get screened out at the beginning itself because of my lack of degree. But then one company was fine with it and interviewded me but only after the HR round was over did they say that they were a BPO . They claimed to have tie up with a big MNC in india , and so off I went to join. On my first day, I was given a script to learn and placed near a senior guy to listen in on his phone call to learn from him. The scam was simple, they had a website similar in name to yellowpages.com but not the real thing. They would call up small businesses (mom and pop stores) in the US and tell them their yellowpages listing was chargeable from that year, and if they don't pay 500$ , it would be removed. If someone other than the owner was attending the phone and said they don't want it , they would use scare tactics like ,"this would get your listing removed.Are you authorized to do that ?" etc. The main targets were old people and less technologically savvy ones I guess. Once someone agreed , the call was routed to another team some place else. Long story short, I didn't go back after the first day- but my friend chose to stay back. Many of them who attended the interview did . I don't have contact with any of them , but now I wonder how many of them turned to bigger scams. None of them had joined there thinking they would be scamming people. At no point in the interview process did the company appear to be scam artists. If anyone is wondering what I did after that, I borrowed some money, checked out the cheapest training course available near by - it turned out to be php (around 120$) and I landed a web dev role in 4 months.
known 9y ago
I've seen many H1B coders from India living in USA on fake "Salary" certificates

124 points by kawera 9y ago

z3t4 9y ago

> “In Delhi, you can’t become an important man without pulling some kind of fraud,” This is not only a problem in India. We need to stop dealing with companies that have bad ethics or values, so that they go out of business. Do not work for them and do not do business with them. Sure you might lose money in the short run, but we all win in the end.

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
It needs people to take a stand and I think that's what's lacking. Often the alternative is not starvation so desperation isn't always an excuse. Look, if everyone around you is a cynic, if everyone around you is saying you're a dummy for being an honest person, if everyone around you is saying 'this is the way things work around here', you need to be brave AND honest to push back against that. Most humans (anywhere) just follow.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  It is worse, consider officialdom in China where any highish official can be brought down for corruption at anytime. So if you are clean, you won’t get promoted, because your higher ups and peers can’t control you with that axe over your head. So ya, you can take a stand, but you aren’t going to go far enough in your career for the stand to make much of a difference, cynicism or not.
  - jimmywanger 9y ago
    Whereas if you can't be brought down for corruption, you will get promoted because you can pay your way off? China's policy is fairly sane. Nobody except for the inner circle of the party can take anything for granted. If you bribe somebody for advancement, if caught, both you and the person you bribe get brought down and punished. Probably a jail sentence, confiscation of any property that you might possibly have gotten through dishonest means, and in severe enough cases, death.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      China’s policy isn’t sane at all. The lack of rule of law means a prosecutor or judge just can’t go out and act on corruption complaints, the party is internally policing itself (you have to be expelled before prosecution is even possible). Who gets brought down for corruption often depends on who they are aligned with, not what they actually did. It’s like wild parking in Beijing, everyone with a car does it, only a very few are ever punished for it. Or the fact that there are brothels everywhere except during CCP congress meetings, law is selectively and conveniently enforced, not fairly at all.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
reallymental 9y ago
Yes, but what happens when everyone is on the short run? People die in the hundreds in India everyday (52 Accidental, and 32 Un-Natural every hour [0]) These ARE due to the sheer population numbers, but you cannot ignore the fact that everyone is on a very quick race, you can run it and die in the process, or you can scam some guy with a bicycle/scooter/car/heli/jet and get there quicker + safer. [0] http://ncrb.nic.in/StatPublications/ADSI/ADSI2014/adsi-2014%20full%20report.pdf http://ncrb.nic.in/StatPublications/ADSI/ADSI2014/adsi-2014%...

Cenk 9y ago

Reply All has a great episode on a similar kind of scam: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/

thesnooze 9y ago
Thought of the same thing. The writer of the Guardian article is actually the journalist the podcasters consulted with in part 2.

reallymental 9y ago

edited: Some grammatical errors. Great read, and full of issues that are discussed on HN everyday. Also, not a new topic, the call centers have been on the decline for long, and for good reasons. > -today, young people from agricultural castes want to work in offices and not farms. I wondered what other options were open to them. > Poojary read it out to me in his best American accent, which he had perfected by the end of his first week. He insisted that I play along as the unwitting American. I'm South Indian, I didn't grow up there, but I can vouch for the condescending tone of Snigdha (the author of this piece). It's very much like how a condescending North Indian talks about a South Indian. And she's the 'educated' North Indian here talking to an 'un-educated' one. The condescension is palpable, and present throughout the piece. I have not read her other 2 pieces, but they're on similar topics, and I expect a similar tone. I'm not sure if it is a reflection of her distaste for the people in these highly questionable occupations, or just sprinkles of editorial hate. > “America is full of old people who live alone. They have no one to turn to if anything goes wrong.” I've heard many arguments about how its a cultural thing, old people in the west (more weighted towards N-America) are treated as a burden. A burden on the economy, a social burden (damn those annoying grandpa's and grandma's). Isn't that why the 401k and MediCare/MedicAid exist? (excluding the set of population that doesn't qualify for them) to pay them(selves) back for their 40+ years of service? I'd like to hear some fresh arguments/data on why they are treated as such. I'd be grateful to anyone who points me to more reading material on this topic. > “It’s very easy to scam Americans. They are very gullible.” It just becomes easier to exploit the opposite side if you just demean them a little. Americans are fat and stupid, the British choose to chew their crap food with their crap teeth, and don't get me started with those vodkaholic Russians. Why don't we go a bit further, dehumanise them, then you're off to war aren't you. I'm just pointing out the micro scale from which these sentiments can snowball, nothing more.

urbanj 9y ago
What the fuck are you talking about, you ignorant dalit. Learn to fucking read, bhenchod.
EliRivers 9y ago
the British choose to chew their crap food What, you don't like curry? :) (cue "no true Scotsman" vis-a-vis UK curry!)

0xmohit 9y ago

I guess that it can be partly attributed to the fact that Indians don't doubt anything even if it's too good to be true. A few years back a neighbor called upon us with his young son who had just completed his graduation. It turned out that wanted to seek my opinion on a job offer his son had received. His son had graduated from a tier-III institute in India; below average academically and all that. Apparently he received an email offering him a job in London, some 110K pounds/annum, all without an interview. I attempted to explain that it sounded fishy if not outright scam, but they weren't ready to listen. A couple of weeks later these guys told my Dad that the ones who offered the job were asking for money under some pretext or the other and that they've decided not to move ahead with it. ---- The scammers realize that people are desperate, gullible and keep on tricking people for years, even decades. Just like the Nigerian prince who was finally nabbed last week [0] after a couple of decades. [0] https://www.theroot.com/white-nigerian-prince-email-scammer-arrested-in-louis-1821658205 https://www.theroot.com/white-nigerian-prince-email-scammer-...

thisisit 9y ago

This is like the boiler room stuff from "Wolf of Wall Street". Unfortunately it is not reviled rather held in awe. One thing which is never talked about in these articles is the failure of Indian government (past and present) to find effective family planning policies. Population growth is through the roof and hence unemployment is huge. With not much left in terms of job prospects lot of people turn to shady stuff. And while the article makes a case for IRS and Microsoft scams, slowly these guys are running domestic scams too. Lot of people receive calls claiming to be from a particular bank/digital wallet company/phone provider. The victims are asked to share the OTP sent to their mobile for "verification". These OTPs are mainly for digital wallets. Once the scammers reset the password they withdraw or spend most of the money in the wallets.

Retric 9y ago
India only has a 1.2% population growth rate including an aging population (https://www.statista.com/statistics/254469/median-age-of-the-population-in-india/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/254469/median-age-of-the...) which is down from 2.2% in 1980 and well below it's ~7% GDP growth rate. They are simply dealing with the normal issues for a rapidly developing nation. Plus the new generation entering the work force is based on their population growth rate ~20 years ago.
- thisisit 9y ago
  I am not sure what is the data source on statista but the last census happened in 2011: http://www.simplydecoded.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TH01_THERN_CENSUS_517537f.jpg http://www.simplydecoded.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TH01... The last decade was the only one where the population growth has slowed. And even then the growth was ~17% in 10 years.
  - ddrmaxgt37 9y ago
    17% over a decade works out to 1.58% every year
  - Retric 9y ago

valuearb 9y ago

Reminded me we hired an indian android developer (contractor) through a phone interview (in US). When “he” showed up for work, it wasn’t him. The contractor who actually showed up couldn’t answer the same questions.

at-fates-hands 9y ago
Had the same thing happen at a startup I was at. We had a .Net developer get hired. First week he showed up and was asked to do some remedial stuff like update some tables on a database and then refactor a few controllers in one of our apps. First day he sat at his desk browsing the internet all day. Second day, the senior dev asked if he needed help and by the third day he was bringing in several .Net programming books to try and help him. By the end of the week he was out. Both founders said they would only hire domestically from now on and do a better job of screening people.
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  Hired a JavaScript developer who passed the technical interview via phone. The guy that showed up couldn't understand the syntax errors that were showing up in the console.
- amrx101 9y ago
  Damn, I dont understand, didn't you guys have a final interview in person.
reallymental 9y ago
Oh the old bait and switch works very well for telephone interviews. Remove them ideally. Perhaps a solution to this could be to give the interviewee something that only he can give the interviewer back when they meet. Something that the interviewee cannot pass onto the 'real' candidate who will appear on the first day. On the other hand, fining the real candidate is the worst way possible, it has to be better than that. It can help prevent this attempt of 'baiting and switching' to a lesser competent candidate in the first place. The attitude should change from 'Oh I can give this test, I'll pass it for sure and you can pay me $X for it', to 'Screw that, they'll find out immediately that it wasn't me.'

known 9y ago

Sounds like an Organized Mafia

jondubois 9y ago

One of the first jobs I had was in a small call centre (doing cold calls). I had to read a script asking random people questions about their financial situation. I think it might have been a scam but I'm still not sure to this day; it just sounded like a standard insurance questionnaire but I don't know what they did with the answers that were collected. I got fired after 2 weeks because my conversion rates were not good enough. I think that these kinds of jobs are morally acceptable. You can't expect the poor to behave ethically while the rich are screwing them over 24/7. You can't have a fair society without some degree of chaos and allowing people to take matters into their own hands. If we accept capitalism, then we must accept all the nasty things that come with it. Many people pretend that capitalism is just a matter of rewarding intelligence over stupidity and hard work over laziness, but it's just as much about rewarding selfishness over selflessness, deception over honesty, short-term thinking over long-term thinking, etc...

ryandrake 9y ago
The rich are screwing over the poor, therefore it's morally acceptable to scam poor and middle class grandmothers out of their pensions? I guarantee it's not the wealthy elite that are being targeted by these scams.
- jondubois 9y ago
  They're wealthy compared to the perpetrators of the crime. If the 'victims' understood the value of their money, then they would never give it to anyone over the phone even if threatened with jail. If someone wants to take my money, they'd probably have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

ryandrake 9y ago

I'm always shocked that these IRS scams ever work, let alone consistently enough to make them viable businesses. Someone with an Indian accent and really bad phone connection calls you up and tells you they are from the IRS and you need to pay them "taxes" with an Apple gift card, and people fall for this?? First off, the government will never contact you by phone. I thought everyone knew this but if not the FTC is here to remind you [1]. Second, even if they did, wouldn't you require some kind of written evidence before you paid? Third, Apple gift cards? Seriously??? I guess a fool and their money are soon parted, but this is a pretty unbelievable level of gullibility. 1: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2013/08/whos-calling-not-government https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2013/08/whos-calling-not-g...

zolthrowaway 9y ago
It's at least partially fear. Fear can get people to do crazy things. Combine this with the fact that many people are totally tech illiterate (think about some of the elderly who call their grandkids every time they need to check their email). I don't think it's very hard to see how something like this can happen.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  If you're on Hacker News, I'll bet that 99% of your country's population is less tech literate than you. It's too easy for us to enter that mindset of, "how could X ever be? It's so obvious!" My wife reminds me of this regularly =)
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    This one has nothing to do with tech though. It's just someone cold calling you, claiming to be from the government and asking for Apple gift cards. You don't need to be a tech wizard to understand that something is clearly amiss.
    - Waterluvian 9y ago
      That's true. I'm conflating tech literacy with some term I don't know. It's the drive to be skeptical and challenge information against a logical framework one has of the world. I would say that it is a part of what "tech literacy" is. I've also got family members who lack it entirely. It's rather bizarre to see someone affected so wholly by new information without knowing how to even challenge that information. "If X is true then why do we not see Y occur?" will usually be met with a shut-down in conversation and a bring-up of hostility.

yakt 9y ago

I find it strange that some recruiters close the hiring process only with telephonic interviews. May be they don't have any respect for their job and their organizations. It is not about the technique of hiring, it is the lazy unskilled people in the hiring team who don't care about the employee's career and the organizations growth. So they get what they deserve. May be if Facebook introduces a button for Add Employee, they will find it more convenient and browse Facebook and start clicking Add Employee after reviewing their profiles. LOL, So funny. Organization needs to pay attention and setup a hiring team who want to do a good job in the task at hand.

pjc50 9y ago
When employee turnover is extremely high and the job itself is a scam, it's not about telephonic screening. It's about scamming as many people as possible into working for the organisation. Quantity over quality.
reaperducer 9y ago
Using social media in hiring decisions is illegal in some states.

zacurry 9y ago

I once got caught up in one of these . I was young , poor and had failed in my engineering exams. I had no coding skills, but was hoping some company would pick me up based on my math skills and train me (that is what most MNCs in india like Infosys do). I was attending different tech job fairs, but would get screened out at the beginning itself because of my lack of degree. But then one company was fine with it and interviewded me but only after the HR round was over did they say that they were a BPO . They claimed to have tie up with a big MNC in india , and so off I went to join. On my first day, I was given a script to learn and placed near a senior guy to listen in on his phone call to learn from him. The scam was simple, they had a website similar in name to yellowpages.com but not the real thing. They would call up small businesses (mom and pop stores) in the US and tell them their yellowpages listing was chargeable from that year, and if they don't pay 500$ , it would be removed. If someone other than the owner was attending the phone and said they don't want it , they would use scare tactics like ,"this would get your listing removed.Are you authorized to do that ?" etc. The main targets were old people and less technologically savvy ones I guess. Once someone agreed , the call was routed to another team some place else. Long story short, I didn't go back after the first day- but my friend chose to stay back. Many of them who attended the interview did . I don't have contact with any of them , but now I wonder how many of them turned to bigger scams. None of them had joined there thinking they would be scamming people. At no point in the interview process did the company appear to be scam artists. If anyone is wondering what I did after that, I borrowed some money, checked out the cheapest training course available near by - it turned out to be php (around 120$) and I landed a web dev role in 4 months.

known 9y ago

I've seen many H1B coders from India living in USA on fake "Salary" certificates