3 ms·

USA carriers should probably just block them like they do almost every Chinese phone number.

woodruffw 4y ago
There's no meaningful blocking here: the victimizing party is spoofing, or using a "legitimate" forwarding service. Carriers could just cut India off entirely, but (1) money finds a way, and (2) we're going to cut off service for a democratic country of over a billion people because of a few scammers? The remediation here needs to be statutory: (1) anti-spoofing needs to happen at the carrier level and not just the terminating connection, and (2) forwarding services need to be subjected to additional oversight and transparency requirements.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  $10 Billion is not just a few scammers. That is an unfathomably huge industry.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I can certainly fathom $10 billion. But I take your point; my point was that, even if there are a million criminals involved in telephone fraud in India, it's a tiny fraction of overall (and primarily legitimate!) telephone traffic. Interfering with over a billion peoples' ability to talk with their loved ones requires existential damage to our country, not frustrating crime that's best resolved with international cooperation. Edit: I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft: nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn't somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don't see the same kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet. [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/ https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
    - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
      I think Americans feel differently about a domestic issue of Americans stealing from Americans than they do about a developing country scamming elderly Americans out of their social security income.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft: nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn’t somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don’t see the same kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet. Cutting F500s off the internet would do nothing about wage theft. There is considerable advocacy for strong action to bring wage theft under control, too. So, I’d say this analogy fails its purpose on multiple levels.

There's no meaningful blocking here: the victimizing party is spoofing, or using a "legitimate" forwarding service. Carriers could just cut India off entirely, but (1) money finds a way, and (2) we're going to cut off service for a democratic country of over a billion people because of a few scammers? The remediation here needs to be statutory: (1) anti-spoofing needs to happen at the carrier level and not just the terminating connection, and (2) forwarding services need to be subjected to additional oversight and transparency requirements.

jjeaff 4y ago
$10 Billion is not just a few scammers. That is an unfathomably huge industry.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I can certainly fathom $10 billion. But I take your point; my point was that, even if there are a million criminals involved in telephone fraud in India, it's a tiny fraction of overall (and primarily legitimate!) telephone traffic. Interfering with over a billion peoples' ability to talk with their loved ones requires existential damage to our country, not frustrating crime that's best resolved with international cooperation. Edit: I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft: nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn't somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don't see the same kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet. [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/ https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
  - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
    I think Americans feel differently about a domestic issue of Americans stealing from Americans than they do about a developing country scamming elderly Americans out of their social security income.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I think a generally useful framing for these kinds of criminal enterprises is comparison to US wage theft: nearly the same amount is stolen from US workers each year in just the top 10 states[1]. This doesn’t somehow excuse phone fraud, but you don’t see the same kind of grousing for cutting Fortune 500s off of the Internet. Cutting F500s off the internet would do nothing about wage theft. There is considerable advocacy for strong action to bring wage theft under control, too. So, I’d say this analogy fails its purpose on multiple levels.