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As someone who lived in the US and now in Germany I just want to tell my American friends that this is not a problem in Germany as far as I know. My German numb

by msoad 3y ago

As someone who lived in the US and now in Germany I just want to tell my American friends that this is not a problem in Germany as far as I know. My German number never gets any spam calls and my friends never talk about spam calls. It's the corporate greed that gets in the way of doing the right thing over there...

throw10920 3y ago
> It's the corporate greed that gets in the way of doing the right thing over there... That's absolutely bonkers. "Corporate greed" is a fuzzy, unprovable, politically-charged and highly unlikely to actually be true catchphrase that means nothing. The fault lies with the US government - there's nothing that prevents it from acting in the interests of their representatives and implementing anti-spam laws, like you did in Germany. There's no difference between German companies and US companies that somehow makes one "greedier" than the other, either. This comment is a nothingburger that, quite honestly, does not belong on HN.
mschuster91 3y ago
It's not like us Germans are free from scams... we have Turkish callcenters who scam dozens of millions of euros [1]. [1] https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/hallo-muenchen/callcenter-betruegern-tuerkei-1128-jahre-haft-ag-phaenomene-polizei-muenchen-opfer-bande-bayern-91817302.html https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/hallo-muenchen/callcenter-b...
- msoad 3y ago
  I believe you, scam is everywhere. What you experience in the US is different. In the news article you sent it's obviously something that they could track down and sentence the fraudsters to jail. In the US you get multiple calls from those robo-callers per day and you practically can't do nothing about it. This is why Apple added "mute unknown callers" to iPhones. This is the best strategy most people have at this point.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    In the US I haven't had such a call in more than a year. The US already cracked down on spam calls (that is routing spam calls). You may remember complaints about how bad things were a year ago though, but things change. What is new is now AI can fake voices and conversations. This makes the cost of such SPAM is lower, and also you can frame someone else. Both of these give incentive to find work around to the current systems (no system is perfect)
sumtechguy 3y ago
That could be selection bias. Not something that the telcos did. Many of these scams are run out of India and Nigeria. They teach English as a second language fairly young. That lets them cheaply target English speaking countries. I am not saying it is because of that but if I was running a scam center (I am already looking for 'the easy way') I am not targeting something where the pool of people I draw from need to know another language. One scambaiting call I watched they had gave the person running the scam had a laptop from about 10 years ago with 4GB of RAM and a very low spec processor. In other words cheap and easy to get. Low monetary risk with high monetary reward. The core issue is the system allows spoofing and poor verification of who is getting blocks of numbers. Also low enforcement of laws in originating countries. The laws actually force the telcos to sort of do this too. As they in many cases must route. But the reality is we have bad actors that we do not want to route. But that same tool to not route could be used for reasons like what many tech companies currently use to get rid of people they do not like for whatever reason.

by msoad 3y ago

throw10920 3y ago

> It's the corporate greed that gets in the way of doing the right thing over there... That's absolutely bonkers. "Corporate greed" is a fuzzy, unprovable, politically-charged and highly unlikely to actually be true catchphrase that means nothing. The fault lies with the US government - there's nothing that prevents it from acting in the interests of their representatives and implementing anti-spam laws, like you did in Germany. There's no difference between German companies and US companies that somehow makes one "greedier" than the other, either. This comment is a nothingburger that, quite honestly, does not belong on HN.

mschuster91 3y ago

It's not like us Germans are free from scams... we have Turkish callcenters who scam dozens of millions of euros [1]. [1] https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/hallo-muenchen/callcenter-betruegern-tuerkei-1128-jahre-haft-ag-phaenomene-polizei-muenchen-opfer-bande-bayern-91817302.html https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/hallo-muenchen/callcenter-b...

msoad 3y ago
I believe you, scam is everywhere. What you experience in the US is different. In the news article you sent it's obviously something that they could track down and sentence the fraudsters to jail. In the US you get multiple calls from those robo-callers per day and you practically can't do nothing about it. This is why Apple added "mute unknown callers" to iPhones. This is the best strategy most people have at this point.
- bluGill 3y ago
  In the US I haven't had such a call in more than a year. The US already cracked down on spam calls (that is routing spam calls). You may remember complaints about how bad things were a year ago though, but things change. What is new is now AI can fake voices and conversations. This makes the cost of such SPAM is lower, and also you can frame someone else. Both of these give incentive to find work around to the current systems (no system is perfect)

sumtechguy 3y ago

That could be selection bias. Not something that the telcos did. Many of these scams are run out of India and Nigeria. They teach English as a second language fairly young. That lets them cheaply target English speaking countries. I am not saying it is because of that but if I was running a scam center (I am already looking for 'the easy way') I am not targeting something where the pool of people I draw from need to know another language. One scambaiting call I watched they had gave the person running the scam had a laptop from about 10 years ago with 4GB of RAM and a very low spec processor. In other words cheap and easy to get. Low monetary risk with high monetary reward. The core issue is the system allows spoofing and poor verification of who is getting blocks of numbers. Also low enforcement of laws in originating countries. The laws actually force the telcos to sort of do this too. As they in many cases must route. But the reality is we have bad actors that we do not want to route. But that same tool to not route could be used for reasons like what many tech companies currently use to get rid of people they do not like for whatever reason.