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I'm genuinely curious as to why this isn't a problem in Europe. I live in the Netherlands and no one I know has ever received even a single call. What makes th

I'm genuinely curious as to why this isn't a problem in Europe. I live in the Netherlands and no one I know has ever received even a single call. What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?

mattmanser 3y ago
You do get the occasional one in the UK. I get one every 2-4 weeks I'd estimate. I imagine part of the reason it's not a bigger problem in Europe is not a lot of people speak Dutch/German/etc. in the countries where these scammers are often calling from. They all speak English though.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  American spam calls include clearly midwestern dialect (chicago, st louis, with a big distance span from there) prerecorded nonsense stories presumably by an unwitting voice actor. I imagine that voice actors in German would be less useful because answering often yields a clearly non North American accent person clearly complicit in whatever scam is being attempted
- robnado 3y ago
  My goto is to speak a non-english language that most people where I live should know. If they don't understand, I hang up. It's a very simple heuristic that allows me to answer important calls while filtering out 99% of scammers.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  France had quite a few spam calls for a while. They got the (en francais) "This is DHL calling and we have a package for you" from a real person... There are a lot of French speakers in the world in poor economic conditions. Probably proportionately more than English. But it's still not as bad as English calls in North America. (In Canada, I just respond in broken French to these calls, any official call would be able to transfer me to a French speaking (and 99.9% certainly bilingual attendant)).
rbultje 3y ago
> What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe? Setting up a business in Europe (for example in the Netherlands) requires significant paperwork. In the US, it's done in a few seconds. In the US, it requires years of court proceedings or (in this case) government agency investigation to shut down a business. (No idea how long that takes in Europe, but I hope your governments are more powerful than this.) Regulation can be a good thing.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Regulation is a double edge sword that often comes back to bite you. So is lack of regulation. It is really hard to find the right balance. It being hard to start a business in Europe means that they are not as innovative, but they also miss out on many scams.
- pembrook 3y ago
  I can assure you, people running robocall scams out of Nigeria and Morocco could care less about the ease-of-incorporation in the territories where their victims are located.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    They still need a way to accept payments and ultimately funnel money out of those territories, and when moving lots of money, a corporation is very convenient. You can work around it of course but this ultimately reduces the profitability of the scams, so better due diligence around companies still fights scams by making it less profitable.
cge 3y ago
In addition to the other comments here, there seems to be a significant difference in the ease of making calls from different numbers in the US vs EU, both in caller id and in the call source. I get constant spam calls to my US phone lines, never from the same numbers and now usually from geographically nearby area codes (same-area-code spam seems passé these days). I get a handful of spam calls a year to my EU phone lines, but they are usually from international, outside-EU numbers, seemingly in hard-to-pursue jurisdictions. (This ignores some of the impressive texts in the EU a few years ago that managed to come from short names of real banks; those seem to have been an unusual exception and I assume the exploit involved was fixed.) Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take longer, and often require documentation, especially for geographic area codes. I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls simply isn't feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to be from 'real' numbers in countries where the scammers are safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.
- HPMOR 3y ago
  This is complete speculation, but I imagine it is a function of the United States developing telecommunications first (+1 area code). People needed easy entry to the communication networks and screening bad actors was not a major concern. Whereas European and other regions developed their infrastructure later, when these threats were more salient.
  - pindab0ter 3y ago
    Say that's the case. What's preventing them from implementing similar requirements now?
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  And a stronger culture of "calling party pays" outside of North America. VoIP rates to call a euro mobile number can be $$$. Meanwhile in Canada, it's the same cost as a landline, and available for fractions of a cent to any nobody like me.
njovin 3y ago
My experience with Robocalls (I get 25-30 per day) has been that the overwhelming majority are trying to run a scam against Medicair (the US government's health program for older people) by fetching some personal information from the victim, which they then use to send fraudulent bills to Medicair. So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this regard contributes to us being the victims here. Edit: I hadn't RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto warranty scams. Second theory: lots of Americans are living below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky/expensive relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.
- supertrope 3y ago
  Signing people up for private Medicare plans is not fraudulent. Making robocalls to hawk them like is. Thus the whole product category becomes shady by association (car warranties, solar leases, debt consolidation loans, timeshares).
  - costco 3y ago
    Typical scam looks more like this: They try to get information from your Medicare card. Then with your info they bill Medicare for $6000 custom back braces while sending you a $30 Chinese generic one (some physician who wittingly or unwittingly accepted a "work from home" job may be signing off on prescriptions for these). Despite Medicare policy, they don't care about collecting any copay from you, they just want to bill Medicare. The elderly person doesn't lose anything but Medicare does obviously. See https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.362202/gov.uscourts.flmd.362202.1.0.pdf#page=25 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.36... for a particularly advanced formulation of this scheme. It's incredibly lucrative and has cost this country tens of billions of dollars a year for at least a couple decades. I wish more was done about it.
supertrope 3y ago
English language. A large pool of marks to robocall, and English speaking call center workers make spamming and scamming economical. Compared if you needed to find French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, etc speakers. It's expensive to call EU cellphones. In the US people are billed to receive calls (of course these days people usually have unmetered calling but the legacy of cellphone numbers not costing any more to call than a landline continues).
- PsylentKnight 3y ago
  I think that's a good point. There's also the fact that most (nearly all?) spam calls come from India, where lots of people know English.
malaya_zemlya 3y ago
They are rampant in RU and UA. One of the craziest stories is how Ukrainian phoine spammers weaponized their skills to coax Russians into setting fire to government offices https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coax-russians-to-set-fire-to-military-offices-reports-a82019 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coa...
jjtheblunt 3y ago
who makes phone switches and software in the Netherlands? I ask because I wonder if the US has unmaintained 20 year old hardware and software builds on it, since Lucent seems to have vanished around then. I mean that I wonder if spammers are taking advantage of unmaintained software, or naive antiquated laws, or both.

mattmanser 3y ago

You do get the occasional one in the UK. I get one every 2-4 weeks I'd estimate. I imagine part of the reason it's not a bigger problem in Europe is not a lot of people speak Dutch/German/etc. in the countries where these scammers are often calling from. They all speak English though.

jjtheblunt 3y ago
American spam calls include clearly midwestern dialect (chicago, st louis, with a big distance span from there) prerecorded nonsense stories presumably by an unwitting voice actor. I imagine that voice actors in German would be less useful because answering often yields a clearly non North American accent person clearly complicit in whatever scam is being attempted
robnado 3y ago
My goto is to speak a non-english language that most people where I live should know. If they don't understand, I hang up. It's a very simple heuristic that allows me to answer important calls while filtering out 99% of scammers.
Scoundreller 3y ago
France had quite a few spam calls for a while. They got the (en francais) "This is DHL calling and we have a package for you" from a real person... There are a lot of French speakers in the world in poor economic conditions. Probably proportionately more than English. But it's still not as bad as English calls in North America. (In Canada, I just respond in broken French to these calls, any official call would be able to transfer me to a French speaking (and 99.9% certainly bilingual attendant)).

rbultje 3y ago

> What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe? Setting up a business in Europe (for example in the Netherlands) requires significant paperwork. In the US, it's done in a few seconds. In the US, it requires years of court proceedings or (in this case) government agency investigation to shut down a business. (No idea how long that takes in Europe, but I hope your governments are more powerful than this.) Regulation can be a good thing.

bluGill 3y ago
Regulation is a double edge sword that often comes back to bite you. So is lack of regulation. It is really hard to find the right balance. It being hard to start a business in Europe means that they are not as innovative, but they also miss out on many scams.
pembrook 3y ago
I can assure you, people running robocall scams out of Nigeria and Morocco could care less about the ease-of-incorporation in the territories where their victims are located.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  They still need a way to accept payments and ultimately funnel money out of those territories, and when moving lots of money, a corporation is very convenient. You can work around it of course but this ultimately reduces the profitability of the scams, so better due diligence around companies still fights scams by making it less profitable.

cge 3y ago

In addition to the other comments here, there seems to be a significant difference in the ease of making calls from different numbers in the US vs EU, both in caller id and in the call source. I get constant spam calls to my US phone lines, never from the same numbers and now usually from geographically nearby area codes (same-area-code spam seems passé these days). I get a handful of spam calls a year to my EU phone lines, but they are usually from international, outside-EU numbers, seemingly in hard-to-pursue jurisdictions. (This ignores some of the impressive texts in the EU a few years ago that managed to come from short names of real banks; those seem to have been an unusual exception and I assume the exploit involved was fixed.) Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take longer, and often require documentation, especially for geographic area codes. I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls simply isn't feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to be from 'real' numbers in countries where the scammers are safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.

HPMOR 3y ago
This is complete speculation, but I imagine it is a function of the United States developing telecommunications first (+1 area code). People needed easy entry to the communication networks and screening bad actors was not a major concern. Whereas European and other regions developed their infrastructure later, when these threats were more salient.
- pindab0ter 3y ago
  Say that's the case. What's preventing them from implementing similar requirements now?
Scoundreller 3y ago
And a stronger culture of "calling party pays" outside of North America. VoIP rates to call a euro mobile number can be $$$. Meanwhile in Canada, it's the same cost as a landline, and available for fractions of a cent to any nobody like me.

njovin 3y ago

My experience with Robocalls (I get 25-30 per day) has been that the overwhelming majority are trying to run a scam against Medicair (the US government's health program for older people) by fetching some personal information from the victim, which they then use to send fraudulent bills to Medicair. So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this regard contributes to us being the victims here. Edit: I hadn't RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto warranty scams. Second theory: lots of Americans are living below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky/expensive relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.

supertrope 3y ago
Signing people up for private Medicare plans is not fraudulent. Making robocalls to hawk them like is. Thus the whole product category becomes shady by association (car warranties, solar leases, debt consolidation loans, timeshares).
- costco 3y ago
  Typical scam looks more like this: They try to get information from your Medicare card. Then with your info they bill Medicare for $6000 custom back braces while sending you a $30 Chinese generic one (some physician who wittingly or unwittingly accepted a "work from home" job may be signing off on prescriptions for these). Despite Medicare policy, they don't care about collecting any copay from you, they just want to bill Medicare. The elderly person doesn't lose anything but Medicare does obviously. See https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.362202/gov.uscourts.flmd.362202.1.0.pdf#page=25 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.36... for a particularly advanced formulation of this scheme. It's incredibly lucrative and has cost this country tens of billions of dollars a year for at least a couple decades. I wish more was done about it.

supertrope 3y ago

English language. A large pool of marks to robocall, and English speaking call center workers make spamming and scamming economical. Compared if you needed to find French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, etc speakers. It's expensive to call EU cellphones. In the US people are billed to receive calls (of course these days people usually have unmetered calling but the legacy of cellphone numbers not costing any more to call than a landline continues).

PsylentKnight 3y ago
I think that's a good point. There's also the fact that most (nearly all?) spam calls come from India, where lots of people know English.

malaya_zemlya 3y ago

They are rampant in RU and UA. One of the craziest stories is how Ukrainian phoine spammers weaponized their skills to coax Russians into setting fire to government offices https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coax-russians-to-set-fire-to-military-offices-reports-a82019 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coa...

jjtheblunt 3y ago

who makes phone switches and software in the Netherlands? I ask because I wonder if the US has unmaintained 20 year old hardware and software builds on it, since Lucent seems to have vanished around then. I mean that I wonder if spammers are taking advantage of unmaintained software, or naive antiquated laws, or both.