4 ms·
Telemarketing basically isn't a thing in my country. The only reason it's so widespread in the US is a failure to regulate it.
by floomk 3y ago
Telemarketing basically isn't a thing in my country. The only reason it's so widespread in the US is a failure to regulate it.
- squarefoot 3y agoI always assume that failure to regulate something, when coming from an entity with essentially unlimited power such as a government, is simply done on purpose.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sieabahlpark 3y ago[dead]
- Simulacra 3y agoHey! Be thankful for the American government, it's the best that money can buy. /s
- squarefoot 3y ago+1 for the irony, but I was meaning broadly. I'm on the other side of the planet, and still find astonishing how those things work in similar ways across the globe.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoAmericans are always working overtime to gimp the government in some meaningful areas and give it ultimate power in others.
- christophilus 3y agoWhat country is that?
- l33tman 3y agoI think in the EU you're only allowed to call someone who you already have a customer relationship with.
- mcpackieh 3y agoMost of these phone scammers are in India, so two observations: they don't care about local laws, and they're far more likely to speak English than French or German. It makes sense for them to target a very large population of wealthy English speakers, e.g. Americans. Yeah, they could call a German and try to scam them in English, but that's probably less likely to work than scamming somebody in their native language.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThe systems that let them spoof numbers appears to be uniquely American.
- jeeeb 3y agoI’m in Australia and get calls and messages from spoofed numbers all the time. The Wikipedia page on Caller ID spoofing is quite informative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing I think it’s much more common in English speaking countries because collectively they’re the most attractive target with 450m+ wealthy consumers.
- floomk 3y agoNo one would answer calls from an Indian phone number and it would be incredibly expensive. This is relevant because number spoofing is blocked by the telcos in the EU.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoWhat's funny is that Americans can very quickly distinguish an Indian accent. So any time I answer the phone and hear an unexpected caller with an unknown voice and an Indian accent calling himself "Kevin" I know it's a scammer immediately and I hang up.
- ilkke 3y agoWhen I lived in Australia these were quite a nuisance. Companies would sell your data as there was basically no real data protection. I don't know if it had changed since. The calls would typically come in waves. I would deal with it by letting the callers know how I felt about them and their job. Some would argue with me saying they bought my number fair and square.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoI lived in Europe and these calls were non-existent too. But I spoke Flemish (which is a dialect of Dutch). So the target area was VERY small. But my friend living in the South of Belgium, who spoke French, got plenty more. If a scammer employs Flemish / Dutch speaking people they'll have a small target audience. For Dutch you're looking at 25 million potential L1 targets [1]. However do that for French and all of the sudden you have about 80 million L1 potential targets [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
- hyperman1 3y agoJust as you, I live in Flanders. I get calls in English, French, even Spanish. Sometimes even in Dutch. In my experience, the English and Dutch speakers hate French, while the French and Spanish speakers hate Dutch. So you choose whatever they hate most and start asking about their favorite brand of toothpicks or whatever untill they fold. Double the fun when they find someone else speaking your language, at which point you switch to another language. Or go to pig latin.
- Semaphor 3y agoGermany, so decently big market. For a short time (a few months after the FB leak which included my phone number), I’d get those robot (literally, old-school automated messages) scam calls from "Interpol" about needing my passport. That lasted for a few weeks, maybe 8 or so calls. No scam calls before that, none since. The number has been the same since about 2002 when I got my first phone.