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RCMP arrest 'money mules' tied to scam calls from India
- RickJWagner 7y agoGood for the Canadian cops! Tax money well spent.
- catalogia 7y ago> ""We have disrupted the necessary flow of money from Canada to India, which will have a big impact on the operation and bottom line of scammers," Ogden said Friday, in announcing the charges." Perhaps so, but to what extent and for how long? How many other mules are there, and how long will it take them to find replacement mules to replace those arrested? I hope they throw the book at the mules, but I don't expect this to be a real solution to the problem.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- unishark 7y agoIt seems like a small story about a small bust, but if you keep reading the story keeps going. They are directly going after the scammers too. > "Police have since worked with Indian authorities to carry out a flurry of raids against suspected illegal call centres in the country. Canadian officials said Friday they know of 39 call centres, in the New Delhi and Noida area, that have been shut down. "Ogden said still others will face police scrutiny and that he anticipates more arrests and charges "in the next few weeks."
- 20150327ASG 7y agoWow... They got THREE people out of the hundreds involved with the scams. Good jorb!!!! I feel so much safer now. </s>
- Huhty 7y agoI get 2-3 calls like these every week. It's getting really bad.
- reaperducer 7y agoUntil about a month ago, I used to get 2-3 a day on my work phone. I gave up answering, and there's about 200 voicemails in there in a language I don't speak.
- dvtrn 7y ago3 a day? Last week I got six in the span of 93 MINUTES. They all matched the area code and prefix of my number but the last four were always different. Block one another calls 12 minutes later. I’ve had this number for 13 years, have ported it across carriers and it’s long been known by friends and family as the default way to find me. This problem was a mild nuisance years ago. It’s a plague now. It may be time to finally give it up.
- cstejerean 7y agoI block just about every number from the area code my phone number is in. I haven’t lived there in that area for a long time and 100% of the calls were spam. One day the spammers will wise up and use the area code where I live rather than where my phone is based but so far Number Shield has worked out great for blocking entire prefixes.
- cbsks 7y agoNumber Shield looks brilliant! I get a lot of spam calls from my area code and three number prefix. I don’t have any legitimate contacts with a phone number like that, so blocking the whole range looks like a good solution. However, I don’t expect any urgent calls from anyone outside of my contacts so I was able to fix the problem by enabling iOS’s Silence Unknown Callers feature.
- dghughes 7y agoI was getting two calls every day from a number without any name. Every single day morning and evening even on weekends. After months I answered and it was obviously a call center but it was from my bank. I'm in Canada and TD spammed me with phone calls for months every day just to ask if I wanted a travel credit card. Even supposedly legitimate calls can be annoying and stupid.
- mysterypie 7y agoHow about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be as small as 2 or 10 cents per call to make these operations unprofitable. I'm sure that the telecom operators in the foreign country could easily track down (or already know precisely where to find) the call centers. Once the fraud falls below a threshold the tariff can be removed. Punitive tariffs, quotas, bans get applied to every kind of product -- counterfeits, contaminated foods, polluting vehicles. I never heard any government agency suggest applying it to countries that are the overwhelming source of scam calls.
- treve 7y agoThe phone system seems pretty absurd. Just the fact that we can't trust originating phone numbers seems odd. There's lots of good ideas to go around, and there's so much in internet technology that could be applied to the phone system, but I'd love to read an article on why its hard to update the phone system.
- smnrchrds 7y agoTake the difficulties of IPv6 migration and remove the ticking clock of running out of IPv4 addresses. How long would the migration take? 10 years? 10000 years? I bet it would be closer to the latter than the former.
- tonyarkles 7y agoAnd add in the fact that Nortel made a ton of the currently deployed phone switch gear, and they haven’t existed for almost 20 years now.
- dade_ 7y agoThe businesses were purchased by Avaya (enterprise) and Genband (carrier). There are support and upgrade paths available. This fact also has nothing to do with the problem.
- thbr99 7y agoThe kind of stories that makes into HN Front page these days is deplorable. High time to write a filter of my own.
- dlivingston 7y agoCan you explain what the issue is with this particular story? Otherwise, your comment doesn’t add much value to the broader discussion IMHO.
- thbr99 7y agoWhat good is this story to be on HN ? There are so many scammers out there on CG. Let's list all of them in HN because it really pikes ones intellectual curiosity.
- Scoundreller 7y agoSo the dude had a regular job so it doesn't seem like a kingpin of any kind. They've been tracking him for months, but they decided to take him down once he arrives for work, because ??? His wife is wanted too, but instead of going to where she is, they just call her and ask her to turn herself in? By publicizing the arrest, the police likely killed their change to get the mule to lead to higher-up takedowns, no? Or have the police completely given up on shutting down the overseas operations?
- zyang 7y agoThat made me laugh, "unmarked vehicles tailed him, switching positions to avoid detection". Knowing Toronto drivers, I wouldn't be suspicious at all if someone tailgated me all the way to work.
- rfrey 7y agoMaybe their thought is to make the mule role seem much more risky to Canadians. If the head org has to recruit from a smaller pool of people, or gangs, that could impact operations. Pure speculation, maybe most mules are already from gangs, etc.
- foxx-boxx 7y agoThey should arrest them for their accent. All these calls are basically money scum.
- Jemm 7y agoThanks you CBC Marketplace for getting the RCMP to finally do something. Marketplace has been exposing these scam companies for years. They even traced their location in India multiple times. Canada needs to secure our telephone systems. It is way too easy for a scammer to get a Canadian VOIP number or to spoof phone numbers. Scam calls lately are have been spoofing my number to call me.
- loceng 7y agoCBC is Canada's publicly funded TV and radio news - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...
- cmer 7y agoNow hoping they put an end to duct cleaning services calls. Another scam. I get 10 of those a week.
- cbanek 7y agoMarketplace actually did a video about the air duct cleaning service scam a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O13Vv4n__J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O13Vv4n__J8 It's really good, and they traced it all the way back to the call center (with an insider)! But of course, no one was arrested. Sadly, I don't think the punishment will fit how much annoyance and time wasted.
- 0_gravitas 7y agoi stopped answering my phone a long time ago, if someone really needs to contact me they can text, email (no guarantee on that though), or hit me up on discord, no spam there