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Overseas Crooks Abuse TTY Phone Service
Rick Zeman writes "The Arizona Daily Star is reporting on how 419 scammers and credit card thieves are abusing the US' TTY service which enables hearing-impaired citizens to make phone calls with the help of an intermediary operator. 'The callers try to use stolen credit-card numbers to make big purchases of merchandise from American companies. The operators often suspect fraud, but they can't just hang up. Federal rules require them to make the calls and keep the contents strictly confidential.' Yes, Virginia, they have no shame...."
Anything that's totally given away for free meant to help a certain segment of society should at least seek proof that the person taking advantage of the service is a member of that segment of society.
No government in the USA hands out handcapped parking permits to everyone who asks. There's a documentation process to certify that one is entitled to it. Sure, that process sometimes gets fooled into giving a permit to somebody not entitled to it, but as least there's a paper trail created by such a fraud that can be followed once it is discovered.
Free TTY services be allowed to issue usernames and passwords to their customers, keep text logs of the conversations, and able to revoke the access of those who abuse their accounts. Basically, the laws that are requiring them to be open are also regulating this service to its death. This needs to be fixed quick.
Let's describe the job of a Relay Operator:
No matter what the phone call, or what the content of that phone call is, the Relay Operator must, by law continue the conversation.
When a deaf person is feeling lonely they might decide to call a phone entertainment line, man or woman, having to type this in, and say what the deaf person types.
Like the job of a relay operator isn't bad enough, now the operators have to deal with Nigerian poor grammer while perpetrating fraud.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Of course scammers are going to find loopholes to do what they want. Although it's shocking to me that they're able to do it still... how long do you think that will last for?
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
How is this different from the same scammers calling people with the same pitch?
:)
I would be a lot more worried about the idea of an outside party filtering my incoming calls without any control from me.
More specifically, it is hard to have fun with phone salesmen or religious door-knockers once they learn to avoid you.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
At the computer shop I run we've literally recieved hundreds of these phone calls. The conversation typically goes like this (but relayed, so it takes forever)
Do you sell laptops?
No, we don't sell any laptops.
How about desktops?
Yes, we do desktops.
Will you ship overseas?
No, no overseas shipments.
Ok..ok...how about Los Angeles.
We can do that.
Ok, I have credit card, I can pay now.
We'd need some sort of verification that you are the cardholder.
The conversation goes downhill from there. The first few times we took it seriously, but since then we've refused to take relay calls. If we hear the operator say "This is a relay call" we interrupt and say "Sorry, we don't take relay calls" and then HANG UP. If you don't hang up, the operator will say "hold" while they type out the message and then wait for a response. Waste..of...goddamn...time. Slamming the reciever down helps. If there's any people who genuinely use the service...sorry, we just can't afford to spend hours wading through these phone calls to get to you.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
It's also logical. Do you steal a lolly pop from a kid, or from a big-ass professional boxer?
I mean, you can't really expect thieves to have a superior sense of morality, do you...
This only proves that playing by the rules is not
for everyone, be they terrorists, scammers or
script kiddies.
It takes a lot of work to make something, abuse
or destruction is so much easier.
This is not just for the deaf or TTY users. There are two types of call. One is a bridge so that a non-TTY-using caller can call a TTY-using friend, in which case there is no good verification process. The other is so that a TTY-user can call a non-TTY-using friend. Verification in this process is a hassle for the TTY-user, and expensive for the company. I would guess that the latter is what is being abused ... however, many companies don't have TTY lines, and thus the service can't say, "we won't connect you to companies".
In addition, the only advantage I can see to doing it as described in the article is being able to thwart caller ID. However, the CA (call assistant, i believe), or operator, is allowed to pass on the number of the caller to the person being called. Thus, if these companies are truly concerned, they can take care of the problem themselves.
Ignorance is truly sad. Dumb by definition is to be without speech. You on the other hand fit into the second definition of dumb, to be lacking in mental capacity.
Anyone else know about the "free matter for the blind" scam?
I read about it several (over 15) years ago in some magazine. Basically when mailing a letter instead of a stamp you just write free matter for the blind.
I think I may have tried it once back then to send myself a letter just to see if it worked. Can't remember if it did though.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
Can be found here:
A irline.mp3
http://phonelosers.org/sound.html
Specifcally this one which would probably get you a trip to camp X-ray today
Phone_Losers_of_America_0118_Deaf_Relay_Commuter_
Beethovan
You replied to the wrong post, deafy.
It's also just one more layer of obfuscation between the scammer and the mark.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
keep text logs of the conversations
This one doesn't make sense to me. Do the people who issue handicapped parking permits keep a list of the places people park? These conversations are often intensely personal; it's literally the only way some of these people can use a telephone. I agree completely with authentication, but keeping records seems intrusive and demeaning. And if they are kept, sooner or later the deaf will start getting "targeted" TTY advertisements...
"You recently mentioned to your mother that you're thinking of moving. Contact Local Realtors Inc for a free consulation!", etc.
To say nothing of the legal implications; a warrentless wiretap on thousands of American phones, always running, in plain-text, east-to-search format.
http://www.relaycall.com/national/index.html
419 scammers and credit card thieves are abusing the US' TTY service ?
Mh, I wonder how they counted that there were precisely 419 of them.
bool Marketoid::IsGood(){return IsDead();}
Someone supposedly calling from "Royal Oil" in Nigeria wanted to order 200 40GB hard drives, by credit card. We told them we only ship overseas if payment is made by wire transfer. Another hint was that it's unlikely an oil company would resort to using a yahoo email address (royaliol@). They called back several times, but we obviously wouldn't budge.
/possibly/ legitimate caller by hanging up, but the translation process takes a while... especially when they're probably on several calls and don't get back to the terminal by the time it's their turn to talk.
The most annoying part was the amount of time it took to complete the calls. I can't be rude to a
Has anyone ever used this to make a call to a 900 number?
I have no developed opinion on the bararity of foo. -homeobocks, Gentoo Forums
Last year I had to track down some carders operating from the US, who were trying to buy products here in Europe with stolen and/or generated credit card numbers. It makes sense to pull that stunt with people (read: jurisdiction) far from your own home...
You know how difficult (and expensive) it is to both track down the people and get a conviction? Laws are made on a national level, institutions such as police and justice departements are also pretty much bound to their specific country (unless you just act as if you own the world), hence international crime has little or no resistance. I mean, why would you care if the crime has been committed elsewhere?...
Same with spam, really. Most spam I receive comes from scumbags on US soil, and it's pretty hard to harm them from here. As opposed to local spammers: a friend of mine once made a real-life visit when he received a spam email from a company not far from where he lives. He didn't get any spam anymore from that company.
That might be a viable solution to the spam problem anyway: just a global team-up of people willing to visit spammers living close to their own home. I'm not implying a violent posse here. Even a criminal would get a clue when there's suddenly a bunch of very pissed off people in front of his/her door.
If you don't want to take the call, the best thing you can do is hang up. It saves the operator (me at one time) a lot of time and frustration.
If the person calls back 2 or 3 times, you might want to take the call, however. The scammers/people who aren't who they say they are won't have you do that. The real deaf people are used to that, so they have you call back a few times in hopes to get a different person who will take the call, or give you a chance to convince the person to talk.
But if you still have no intention of taking the call, just hang up, saying as little as possible.
It saves the operators a lot of trouble.
//FIXME: Bad
"The only possible beneficiaries are the successful scammers - profiting from free phone calls intended for deaf people - and the four phone companies that provide Internet relay service. They are paid for the calls by the minute."
Name me one smart death person.
Death person? Is that another term for Zombie?
Ok... here goes... a smart death person:
John Kerry
Casual Games/Downloads
Here's a simple fix:
Change the TTY/Realy number to a 1-900 numner and charge calls from whereever ther're made. Say $1.00 a minuite.
Then every month - Registered and bonified deaf people can submit a copy of their telephone invoice to the Federal Government and get a refund check for the amount used.
People who abuse the system without being daaf get to pay for it - deaf people get this vital service for free.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Can't the merchants just require the 3-digit security code on the back of the credit cards , if they're losing money?
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
I'm somewhat ignorant on this whole issue, but why don't the TTY service centers only accept calls from certain area codes and be done with it? There's no reason why they should have to service calls from outside their service area (which I'm assuming is regional to AZ), much less outside the country.
What am I missing here?
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
FYI, they have adopted the same response you have. I am certain we'll be sued as well because some folks designed an exploitable soltion and then legislated (read: forced) its use.
On a related note, this strongly smells like the spam laws of late.
Regards,
-- RLJ
I'm hearing. My boyfriend is deaf. I can pick up any voice phone, call the relay service, and use it to call my boyfriend. The CA types what I say, and reads to me what my boyfriend types back.
How would you put a password protection on this? Would every hearing person have to register a spoken password to be able to call a deaf person?
The point of the relay service is to allow deaf and hearing people equal access to the phone system. If I need a password to call a deaf person but not a hearing person, that's hardly equal access.
Deaf people would never stand for such unequal treatment. They would be even more insulted if you said that they can't take care of themselves by screening their own scammers as hearing people do.
If the operator is, by law, required to facilitate the conversation, what happens if it is blatantly illegal, such as a terrorist plot, or a deal for kiddy porn or drugs? the operator is required to keep the conversation confidentail? It is not like there can't be deaf criminals. And besides, if these people are not even deaf, what is to say that the same thing can not be done by criminals or terrorists?
is the opperator still required to facilitate the conversation and keep quiet? isn't that then like, being an accessory to the crime, maybe even conspiricy? If they call the police, then is that evidence or witness testimony inadmissible for breaking the confidentiality of the service?
So does this mean TTY is dead?
been done.
Relay companies get paid XX amount of dollars per day, assuming they can meet a certain service level. They have to answer calls queued into their system within a certain period of time. Every call that isn't answered is counted against their running total.
If a relay company falls below a certain percent (it's around 80% or so in a 24 hour period of time), they receive NO MONEY for that day. For the company I worked at, they had 1 day last year where they failed to maintain the standard. The amount of money lost for 1 day? Approaching $3 million according to management.
Anyone saying that business isn't a money making enterprise is full of BS.
Helen Keller. I would however be hard-pressed to name a smart AC.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
n/t
Yes, I have personal experience with this. I used to do telephony troubleshooting for a phone entertainment company.
Here
look at the 419 page link in this post and read what it says at the bottom of the page when you get there.
"419 Coalition tracks hits on this page, employing Watchwise to do so. This page, the "index page" of our site, is the only page on it we track. 419 Coalition reserves the right to use all hit data and all materials received by us in any way we, in our sole judgement, see fit, including relaying data and materials to such authorities as we deem useful. For a full statement of our Privacy Policy click here. "
Of course if you go there your ISP and IP info is now in the control of these arrogant asses
SMS. I noticed a deaf guy at a bar the other night thumbing away on his cellphone. Evidently having a very good conversation with whomever. I thought "now THERE is a good use for that technology". Obviously, the person on the other end needs one too, but it removes the relay person from the middle of the conversation.
How about AC Green? Played lots of professional basketball, is now a motivation speaker and business owner, and zero kids out of wedlock.
TTY = Teletypewriter
I'm getting an average of ten 419 Emails a day. I've now sucessfully trained our classifier to pull them out, and put them into a special mbox and then sends them to Treasury Dept automatically.
Of course I DO manually review them and can glance at 50 messages at a time, and within 3 seconds confirm they are all 419's.
I click a single button, satisfied that our Treeasury Dept has yet more work to do...
Yup!! We gots to let our good ol trusty government earn their keep...
Same goes to spam, but we only report those that refuse opt out requests.
Sheesh - last week, we were getting about 2500 spams a day. I don't see them now, and happy to report although our filters are slow (25 messages/min) there are NO false positives after processing 56,000 spams.
I can't wait until we upgrade our hardware, then it will be 5 times faster....
Our Auto-reporting system can shut down approx 10,000 infected spam proxies per week, provided the ISP's act on them.
Our spam count has definately decreased, as the spam cound has gone down to about 1500 a day.
I kinda like the idea of being so popular with spammers, because all these infected hosts are telling me who they are, so I can shut them down.
I get wind of a new spam fighting portal soon to go online, empowering members and spam fighters the ability to really put the screwes to spammers.
As soon as I know more about it, I'll post something about it.
Can a TTY user have phone sex, or is this something the deaf shouldn't be allowed to access?
Those should be recorded nationwide and cut into three hour show, where the deaf person's written part of the conversation is read aloud via Stephen Hawking's rig, and the TTY operator is made to read the transcript of what they wrote in their own voice.
As a student loan company, we get an enormous number of these calls every week. Every time we have a new hire, we have to take at least half a day of training to educate them on the various ways that overseas scammers will attempt to take advantage of phone reps. The TTY server, and AT&T's Internet Relay service, are badly abused. It's to the point now where we are considering a voice message to direct the rare legitimate TTY-necessary customer to either email or fax options - at least with those options, we can blacklist originating exchanges (outside the US) or on spam lists.
It's really sad, but there will always be those whose work ethic embodies the tragedy of the commons to the fullest.
Subscribe for free to my show!
Man abuse like this makes me so angry. Instead of Iraq, we should go into Nigeria and Ghana, kill half the people, enslave the rest and put them to work giving our companies their natural resources (oil, minerals, lumber, etc.) directly. Dirty savages...
to say that my kinky daughter can't be a phone sex intermediary for the blind! My guess is, that if you can find enough people to be phone sex operators, you can find enough to be phone sex intermediaries.
Photos.
- Websites Fighting the Nigerian Scam/419
- Nigerian Advance Fee Scam
- US Secret Service on 419
- Break The Chain
- 419 Coalition (as noted in the article)
Here are a few sites dedicated to exposing 419 scammers in an interesting and/or amusing way:chongo (was here)
Somethingawful already do this?
Link?
of the jokes some friends of mine used to play with the Sprint Online Relay. Prank calls mostly, but I've heard that someone tried to call in a bomb threat or something with it to cancel school...
So, basically this is nothing new.
by the way, it's at http://www.sprintrelayonline.com/
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
Alright, I actually RTFA and I still don't get it. Scammers are abusing TTY services (or, more accurately, web-based applications intended to replace Ye Olde Teletypes). What I still don't understand is why?
I suppose the scammers realize their accents or (relatively) poor grasp of English might make the recipient of the calls suspicious, but it seems that TTY calls are rare enough to garner attention of their own. Are the scammers that short-sighted?
Or is it related to Penny Arcade's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and the scammers don't have the nerve to try pulling the scam "face-to-face"?
At any rate, how much to these TTY terminals cost?
Operators have to maintain confidentiality. No excuses. There's a section in our manual (i'm an operator btw) that specifically deals with bomb threats to the center. But there are 2 different situations. One is if they direct it to the operator, in which case it's treated like a normal call to the center and law enforcement is notified etc. The other one is if they mention it during a call. The operator is bound by law to say nothing, and continue relaying the call as normal ("Sorry, i have to go home, I don't feel well. And for that matter neither do you ::SIGNIFICANT LOOK::").
I would also assume that any information given by an operator in breach of confidentiality would be inadmissible. Operators cannot be forced to divulge information from call content, and doing so is risking your job, and possibly other penalities. Someone did post links to sites about operators doing that though, so it's not like it doesn't happen.
First of all we are not supposed to process International calls. If the CA determines the user is from outside the US there is a phrase that is typed. The problem is trying to convince a supervisor that 80.179 is Israel. They barely know what an IP address is let alone the use of whois to determine the ownership of a block of IP's.
The problem is they can't! The FCC has everything all fucked up.
And they are wasting his time and trying to stick him with an uncollectable credit transaction. Yes, it's possible that a real deaf person could call. But he said that hasn't happened yet. The deaf could use the website or appear in person or have a family member or friend call if they didn't have a computer and didn't live in the area.
So there is no taking care of themselves. They are just bystanders.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The biggest problem here is that ordering over the phone or tty with stolen credit or ID info is much too easy to scam.
There should be double the punishment for committing the crime of ID fraud than there is now. Thrice when done under the guise of using services for the disabled -- a hate crime of sorts.
A scammer stole a vital resource to an upright member of society; a call to a doctor perhaps for urgent assistance, calling for a ride for personal saftety reasons (night, weather, etc). This would constitute a double theft and causing a societal safety issue that makes it a hate crime as it exploits a protected group, the disabled.
Also many watchdogs urge that society demand that _Free_ credit reports be given to victims of credit/ID theft be given for 5 years after each & every breach. For repeated breaches (when not the user's fault) the credit agency and merchant _not_ the consumer should be held accountable.
Both merchants that took stolen numbers and the credit agencies should be fine each other heavily till they start insisting the everyone improve the authentication mechanisms of their credit systems.
Merchants and Credit bureaus should not by legislation be allowed to pass monetary loss onto consumers.
I'm suspecting that soon TTY centers will have the international calling flags installed like most credit card processing centers. These typically let the operator know the call is somehow not originating from inside the country.
Although with outsourcing this is going to be sticky to impliment.
Filename: troubleshooting_bombthreat.doc
Design Date: 08/01/01
Designer: Face
CALL SET-UP
Condition: Caller states there is a bomb
Follow Center procedure to call supervisor
Ask WHEN WILL BOMB EXPLODE Q GA
Ask WHERE IS BOMB NOW QQ GA
Ask WHAT DOES BOMB LOOK LIKE Q GA
Ask WHAT KIND OF BOMB IS IT QQ GA
Ask WHAT WILL CAUSE BOMB TO EXPLODE Q GA
Ask DID YOU PLACE THE BOMB QQ GA
Ask WHY Q GA
Ask WHAT IS UR ADDRESS Q GA
Ask WHAT IS UR NAME Q GA
NOTE Tone of voice/background sounds/type of language used
Allow Operations manager/supervisor to take over
IF DURING A CALL, A CALLER STATES THERE IS A BOMB IN THE RELAY CENTER
Relay call as usual
Remember CONFIDENTIALITY IS A FEDERAL MANDATE!
GETTING STARTED CALL PROCESSING BILLING OPTIONS TROUBLE SHOOTING ABBREVIATIONS BOMB THREAT
Helen Keller is known for striving past the limitations of being deaf, blind, and mute. But did you know that she was later known for being a famous member of the American Communist party. Her leftist ideals primarily focused on the awareness of female sexuality.
That's right. Helen Keller grew up to be a communist slut (I mean that word in the sweetest way possible).
My wife's deaf, and back in '94, when we where dating, that was the only way we had to communicate too. (For a while, I wanted to type "GA" at the end of all my emails) I was supprised that the service existed, since you could basically make a long distance call without paying any fees. So it's no supprise that people have finally begun to misuse it.
;)
Since it's only the online service that seems to be effected, probably because it can be used in conjunction with translation programs, I think it'd be appropriate to put a loggin on the web site. But use cookies, so you don't have to re-loggin each time.
Instead of tracking conversations word-for-word, they could give the operators the option of flagging a conversation as a possible scam. If an account has too many flags, close it and block the IP address. In fact, if the IP addresses are stored, you might not even need a username/password.
GA SK
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Sure, just call 867 5309.
Photos.
I used to work at a small OEM computer manufacturer, and we got those TTY calls occasionally. It wasn't too hard to tell they were scamming us. They wanted FedEx to pick up the shipment (as opposed to having us handle the shipping), and as soon as I suggested anything the response was "Yes, we want that!" - Although their grammer wasn't nearly that good...
I remember one call where I told them "We have a system that costs $900." They immediately responded with "Yes, we want twenty of those." No haggling, no questions about CPU, RAM, or anything else. I just told them the price and they said they wanted twenty. At this point I told the operator to tell them to stop calling us, and that we're not stupid enough to fall for their scam (I think that was the third time I'd talked to them).
This space for rent...
Ah, so you're one of those jerk operators! ;)
Before we had an internet connection, I had to use the relay to talk to my wife. There where times I'd ask the operator a legitamite question but they'd type it out to her instead of answering.
I can't remember the questions right now though. But I do remember trying to talk to my wife (girlfriend at the time) with a male operator made it really hard talking bf/gf stuff.
I was SO glad when I found out my 2400 baud modem could connect to her TDD directly over the phone lines. (But only if she called me and my modem answered)
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Slashdot is suggesting that we limit the liberties of others in the name of security! I thought this place was always will to protect the rights of people using public services, but now I see that they have decided that this is wrong.
I wonder where they draw the line.
Are people upset that the calls can't be logged?
Are people upset that the users don't have to register and log in?
I've heard so many people complain about these issues in other contexts, and its funny to see people here advocate the other side, just because of one puny article!
Hahahahaha...
I work at a computer retailer, and we get about one of these calls a day, almost always for purchases of several laptops. (expensive nice ones, macintosh or toshiba usually) Our sales manager has implemented the policy that as soon as the TTY voice is heard, recite "DO NOT CALL BACK EVER AGAIN" and hanging up. It seems a bit rude to me, but then again, attempting to scam a small business out of thousands of dollars is also quite rude.
This apparently has been going on for the last several years, so it's nothing new. I was surprised just how many of these calls we get - there must be quite a few scammers out there running through the phonebooks looking for a mark.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is an internet service that is being abused. This service is supposed to be used only by residents of the United States. Would it be so difficult to do a reverse DNS lookup on the caller and making sure they are connecting to the service from inside the USA? Or at least make sure they are not coming from Nigeria or whatever. Anyone?
I wouldn't try this on a regular basis: This could be seen as an attempt to defraud a party (the USPS, of their rightful payment) by means of the USPS.
That's a prima-facie case of Mail fraud which is very broad, easy to prove and attracts draconian penalties.
T&K.
Political language
1.) I pay taxes, so since the telephone system/roads/etc are subsidized by my money, I should be able to use them. This is also why federal parks are free for the disabled; most paths are inaccessible, so it's like a rebate for the tax money we spend on it.
... you're coming mighty close to the kind of ideas that Hitler and other eugenicists advocated, and still advocate. The Jews were not the only group he tried to murder.
2.) If I can work (because your tax $s help pay for a car I can drive, or because I can use a phone, or whatever), that's cheaper than putting me on welfare.
3.) Because if you ignore the disabled (as society too often does) you lose out on, say, Stephen Hawking, or other "valuable" disabled folks.
Without meaning to invoke Godwin's Law
Ever tried SMS'ing a long conversation? I doubt it. Dumbass.
If they recieved no money for that day, then they had to pay all their operators, pay for equiptment, bandwidth, ect, and recieved no compensation. So the three million they lost is not 3 million in profit, but rather 3 million in revenue. If they have close to 3 million in expenses per day, then they would make little to no money off the service.
I have blog like everyone else
So I have to put in my 250,000 lira. Mind you, this is never going to be noticed, due to my happy anonymity.
BUT:
I work for MCI Worldcom as a relay operator. More specifically, the California Relay Service (CRS). Our center handles calls from IP-RELAY.com (so do the Arizona Relay, the Tennessee Relay, and the Wisconsin Relay, if anyone cares). So all day, it's prank calls and Nigerian scammers. There are a few deaf people using the service, but not many. The signal-to-noise ratio is much too low, so to speak. I make a few measly dollars and hour to put up with this sort of shit. (But at least the health benefits are okay)
It's always Ghanans and Nigerians. Every single fucking time. Not Koreans or Israelis or anyone else. Most are in Accra, Ghana.
They buy very few computers, despite what the article says. Mostly, they call printing shops to order blank T-shirts. I'm not really very sure why printing, silkscreening, and embroidery shops would even sell blank white T-shirts in the first place, but they do. Did I mention it's always XXL and XXXL shirts? Don't let those Sally Struthers commercials fool you; people in Ghana are fucking CHUBBY.
Today, it was wedding dresses. I'm curious why people don't get suspicious when someone wants to order 6 wedding gowns over the phone. Especially when they don't care what sizes or styles, just the price. Not extra large, though, oddly enough, so maybe they're not all as chubby as it seems.
Some days it's shoes. Some days it's designer perfume. Or gold wristwatches. And some days it is in fact computers.
And 99% of the time, the credit card is declined. And 90% of the time when that happens, the fucking moron at whichever shop I'm calling will actually ask the person if they have another card. They always have a spare, sometimes with a completely different name.
Things to look for, if you're a store:
- The scammer will always ask to have the shop run the credit card while they are on the line. This means, in stores with only one line, that the credit card machine will AUTOMATICALLY approve the card if it passes whatever obscure checksum process they go through. Nice trick.
- The scammer will, if pressed for a phone number, say that it's not currently working. They don't claim to be deaf and have no phone, which is actually pretty common among the deaf. Instead, they give a phone number with too many digits to be a US number, or an email address. This email address will be composed of a foreign-sounding name, but it will NOT match the name the person gave on the card.
- The total price will be just shy of $10,000 to avoid hitting the card's limit, OR it will be some multiple of that, and the scammer will have several cards.
So, every now and then the scammer gets someone to ship him something, be it a half dozen BMW radiators or a $9000.00 Bernina commercial grade sewing machine. He gets his payoff. Congratulations, you stupid sons of bitches, you've successfully stolen things. What do you do with the money?
You give it to terrorists, of course, so they can go to pilot school. Allah Akbar! (or whatever) Thank goodness for weak extradition treaties, otherwise this wouldn't be possible.
So do the executives at MCI know about all of this? Of course. The government is giving them a whole fucking load of money every day to keep the relay centers open. Hope it's worth it, guys. As for me, I'm out of there as soon as I get my book written (never).
Quite frankly, I don't see much of a problem with the TTY service. There are plenty of other opportunities for said scammers to fraudulently buy products with someone else's financial information. The operators are doing their duty just as they should; being a truly anonymous & non-interacting relay.
Logging conversations for later access would be an immense privacy violation, putting the TTY-using deaf/dumb population at yet another disadvantage. A lot of it wouldn't even be useful with the only traceable information being the IP address of the Internet connection (unless some reference was made in the call... which could easily be fabricated).
It does seem logical to verify that the users of this system are deaf/dumb & are in need of this service. But this would add a whole new layer of nessesary infrastructure to the TTY system. I can think of no foolproof test {online or in person} for the lack of speech or hearing, which can both be faked without too much effort. Even if we were able to obtain such information perfectly, it is unlikely that much useful could be done with it. A government listing of hearing impaired persons & unique ID numbers? With this time of nationwide government database integration & information mining, it would be wise to consider the effects of yet another well-seeming database & its effects in strenghtening the informational power of the feds over the populace. Consider this too: the assignment of "hearing impared" authorization #s or IDs will not significantly hinder criminals who already make a business of illegally obtaining similar uniquely-identifying, supposedly confidential, information.
The responsibility rests on both ends of the transaction. The middleman simply does not have the resources to effectively intervene, nor the responsibility for what is being anonymously forwarded.
How is using TTY any different than ordering over the phone? I could (and have) taken my mother's credit card and ordered things with her card. She has a female name ,I have a female voice. I could have been any female that stole the card. I dont see how ordering through TTY relay service allows for more scamming than ordering over the phone does?
:-/
I think i'm missing something..
Moreover, I'd like to add, as a child of 2 deaf parents, that is extremely frustrating and saddening when companies hang up on the relay service. Deaf people are PEOPLE. Would you hang up on a hearing person for trying to place an order? Extremely, extremely rude..
You've made me think about something I take for granted. I'm the grandparent AC, BTW.
1.) Not really. You have the choice to use it, at least. And my nat'l parks analogy was a bad one. I should've stuck with the telephone system. While I wouldn't care if I didn't get into national parks free, I doubt you would get far arguing that you shouldn't pay taxes because you don't use a phone (I bet you do, but some could argue that), or you didn't benefit from a free public education (even if you went to private school, you benefit) or some other government subsidized service that you don't use.
2.) No, I'm not arguing right==cheaper. I'm saying that paying a little people to support themselves is cheaper than paying a lot to keep them completely gov't subsidized. Which is the idea behind public education and several other gov't services, actually.
3.) Yes, it is. First, even those of us who aren't brilliant, add value to society. Second, even if you don't believe that first idea, finding that one valuable person in a million can be worth it. If you only support the valuable, then (a) how do you decide what makes someone valuable (b) how do they show they're valuable if not given an opportunity to do so (c) how do they develop the skills that make them valuable?
There are SMS (and e-mail and IM) capable smart phones with qwerty keyboards. While typing on a numeric keypad is indeed a huge pain in the ass, give a phone a more standard keyboard and you're all good.
Heck, if Bush can invade Iraq on a whim, why not invade Nigeria and shut down the scammers? Certainly they've cost the US economy just as much damage as Iraq's WoMD?
Rick DeBay
If I need a password to call a deaf person but not a hearing person, that's hardly equal access.
That isn't the problem--you can call your boyfriend as much as you like without a password, since your land line and cell phone are already authenticated (they are linked to you).
The problem is that there appears to be a free, anonymous service available over the Internet without authetication that goes into the phone network. Nothing comparable exists for hearing users (even if I use IP telephony, I have to identify myself and usually pay for it).
So, requiring a password for accessing an Internet-to-phone gateway would not result in unequal treatment at all--rather, it would implement a sensible precaution that every hearing person already has to live with.
Introducing ... ME! And hundreds of my friends. And those are just the ones I know.
Although I guess I'm not all that smart - I bothered reply to a troll post on a slashdot article, when I usually read at 4+.
'death'. I dearly hope your spelling is the worst of your faults.
Talking to folks without cell phones? What if I can't get a cell provider in my area that doesn't take 20+ minutes to deliver an email/IM/SMS? What about the fact that your (assuming you're American) phone system was subsidized with my tax dollars? (Oh, and, no, that's not an argument saying that you shouldn't have to pay taxes for programs you don't use; it's an argument saying you should be able to use those services that you have paid for, that every single person uses. There are situations, nat'l parks for example, where it's just too expensive to provide equal access, but within the gov't should provide what schools/employers have to provide: reasonable accomodation. Meaning not too expensive. You should have the OPTION of using these services.)
That should read, "within reason the gov't should provide"
Get rid of the internet TTY option.
...
If the scammers had to use a real phone, they would run up huge phone bills from Nigeria.
Or use their stolen credit cards to try to scam the phone company
Even more inconvienient is trying to talk to a loved one, who happens to be deaf, and having to do it through a 3rd party. Ever tried signing to someone 50 miles away? I doubt it. Dumbass.
Jebus. I didn't say that was the be all and end all solution. Just that it seemed an incredibly enabling bit of technology for someone who can't speak or can't hear.
They can, just like everyone else, call someone on the phone and have a 1 on 1 conversation with them. Without a translator.
We got another one prior to this, although not through a TTY service, by a guy who claimed to be a U.S. soldier stationed at Guantanamo Bay, and he needed a satellite service setup. He wanted us, though, to ship it only to New York. Not only did I think it extremely likely that a US soldier would need us to send him a satellite setup, and even less likely that he'd be allowed to admit he was at Gitmo, but he didn't even introduce himself officially - it came out later in the conversaton. Suspicious, I began asking for a lot of information - like an email address, and he gave me a Yahoo one, rather than a US military address. I told him we couldn't help him out, and that night I reported it to the FBI.
The boss told me later he'd almost been duped by one of these guys, although the product never got shipped because he began to smell a scam and he cancelled the order at the last minute (my boss did, not the scammer). Our sort of unofficial policy now is we don't ship out of state unless it's for a customer we already know.
IP (internet) Relay calls all come in with no state announcement. With Sprint, it's "A person is calling you through Sprint Relay".
If you get a call from Relay (State)/(State) Relay, you can be fairly sure it's a legit call. Deaf folks type slow, but they generally don't want to order 900 laptops. Whether or not you want to deal with deaf people, that's up to you. Scam dudes are fairly easy to spot, though.
Furthermore, as a relay operator I have no idea why any merchant would kick out thousands of dollars in merchandise to Oshkosh, WI (much less BFE Africa) before verifying the card/cardholder info. That's greedy and stupid.