4 ms·

> Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem The US is also a large and attractive target, because the population is large and the setup costs

> Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem The US is also a large and attractive target, because the population is large and the setup costs of a phone scam can be amortized across a massive group. Remember that scamming is a numbers game - they have to hit massive numbers of targets in order for it to pay off, because the probability of success is so low at each stage. Phone numbers within the US are compatible - there's no longer any meaningful difference between calling someone in Maine or Alaska - and it's easy to spoof area codes across state lines. So a scam that works in one state in the US can effectively be run in all 50 states with ~no change. Sweden is a country only slightly larger than New York City, and an effective scam would likely have to be run in Swedish (a language not spoken widely outside Sweden, and therefore not transposable to another scam) and it's trickier to spoof numbers across country lines convincingly (even within the EU) than it is across state lines in the US. This pattern plays out in a lot of ways, not just for Sweden. In general, smaller countries that speak languages not widely popular outside their home country will be less attractive targets (both for scams and for legitimate business) than countries which have a large potential market (target) size.

onetimeusename 4y ago
I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know. That might require the carrier to forward the calls. There are other exceptions for robo calls the callers could be using for themselves. If the robodialers are actually doing this inside of the US we could probably find who these people are. I imagine the majority of calls are made by a few scaled up calling operations. That's what previous arrests for this suggest. Although the technology is catching up and I have been getting fewer calls.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know. Maybe this wasn't clear in my previous comment: the calls often originate from outside the country, yes, but the calls are spoofing US numbers, so there's no way for the recipient to know that the call is from another country. And the calls often try to match the local area code of the recipient. The point is that the scam scales very easily: if you can do it to any person in one state, you can do it to every person in every state (because calling all US phone numbers is essentially equivalent, and spoofing all states is equivalently easy).
  - onetimeusename 4y ago
    ya, that's what I have seen. I can't prove they originate from outside the country but I suspect it.

onetimeusename 4y ago

I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know. That might require the carrier to forward the calls. There are other exceptions for robo calls the callers could be using for themselves. If the robodialers are actually doing this inside of the US we could probably find who these people are. I imagine the majority of calls are made by a few scaled up calling operations. That's what previous arrests for this suggest. Although the technology is catching up and I have been getting fewer calls.

chimeracoder 4y ago
> I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know. Maybe this wasn't clear in my previous comment: the calls often originate from outside the country, yes, but the calls are spoofing US numbers, so there's no way for the recipient to know that the call is from another country. And the calls often try to match the local area code of the recipient. The point is that the scam scales very easily: if you can do it to any person in one state, you can do it to every person in every state (because calling all US phone numbers is essentially equivalent, and spoofing all states is equivalently easy).
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  ya, that's what I have seen. I can't prove they originate from outside the country but I suspect it.