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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...."
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!
50 state governments are in the USA, not to mention countless county and city governments,
all of which supply aid in some form to those with special needs.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
well, there's the federal, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, several other protectorates. This doesn't count the several thousand county, township, borough, and city governments per state.
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
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_
Um, yes. By law, and by the very job specification they had when applying, they do have to do this. It's not like it's a huge surprise, right: "Oh mai gahd! A human wants to talk about sex! With a member of the opposite gender!!"
Assistants to disabled people have dealt with this for a long time; there is even accepted codes of conduct for various situations (basically, assistants should have a similar moral outlook as their bosses, or they will likely not be able to work together over time).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I worked as a relay operator for about 9 months before I quit because it was ridiculous.
Mind you, this wasn't normal tty relay. This was IP-Relay, which allows anyone with a computer to use it as a tty basically.
Because I've signed NDA's and don't really want to break federal law, I can't go into detail about any calls, but I think I can safely say that what the article describes is pretty accurate.
Also, As for sex lines, that's not too common with IP-Relay. What is common though is bored high school kids calling each other and being very creative with what they make you say/type.
It's funny for a while, and not that bad of a job, but a lot of it is tedious, dull, and annoying (Touchtone menus...AARGH).
//FIXME: Bad
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
That doesnt work at all.
What they use is the free internet relay service, which lets you use your computer as a TTY.
www.ip-relay.com is one.
ATT also has one, someone earlier posted the URL.
//FIXME: Bad
TTY = Teletypewriter
Devil's Advocate here...
Maybe we need to rethink the whole 'equal access' thing. Why jump through hoops to give the disabled to nearly every segment of society? So they can feel 'normal'? They aren't... that's part of the definition.
I mean, what's the point? What is the justification here? I'm not asking this to make flames or troll here... I honestly want to know why this is considered to be a good and desirable thing?
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Free TTY services be allowed to issue usernames and passwords to their customers,
Yes. Requiring some sort of proof that the service is needed as you suggest might also be desirable.
keep text logs of the conversations,
No.
As I recall my sign language instructor explaining, the TTY Relay Service operator (and, I suppose, anything they might keep a hypothetical log with) is legally considered to be part of the telephone. They are NOT allowed to discuss anthing they hear; and any testimony they give about anything they have heard prior to a wiretap warrant being issued is legally inadmissable. You can be planning a murder, and the operator just has to relay the messages back and forth. It's a condition of legal privilege similar to those of spouses, doctors, lawyers, and the Secret Service.
Allowing mandatory logging would effectively put a bug into the phone of every deaf person who has need of this service. Any regulation or legislation permitting this would be struck down in court as a violation of the equal protection and reasonable search clauses.
As for the phone companies doing it themselves, they are under what is called "common carrier protection"-- they make no judgements over what to carry, they just send the voices back and forth, whether it's a call to mom or a death threat. Yes, harrassing calls are illegal, but the phone company only can take action AFTER the recipient complains. Logging, and revoking access based on use, would remove the Telco common carrier protection, and they REALLY don't want to do that. Not to mention the incidental that this might get them sued for civil rights violations under that pesky equal protection clause again.
This report does lead me to wonder, however. I recall being informed by a professor who specializes in history of computing that the phone phreak community back in the 1970's to 1990s was had a very large blind community. While speculations on the cause of that are moot to the matter at hand, there might actually be a group of deaf/hard-of-hearing folk who are gathering around this new (and even less moral) illegal activity. If so, it would be depressing.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I just argue with one.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
- 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)
It's hard to get used to talking to a person whom is, in effect, acting.
That's 200000-700000 people using an older type of tty terminal.
/. I'll chime in here with some clarifying information. TTYs are not what most /.ers would consider a tty. To communicate with the old, unfortunately almost standard, Baudot style TTY, you need to buy a special modem. Baudot is dog slow (45.45 Baud) and a fast typist can easily out-type the protocol. At the receiving end it is incredibly painful to wait for someone to get through a long sentence. Newer, proprietary, fast protocols (e.g., TurboCode) have removed this bottleneck, but computer compatibility still requires hardware.
Since this is
This hardware requirement why internet relays are so nice - you can just use a regular computer without messing with extra gear and you can call from just about anywhere. Furthermore, you can now access the internet relays via smartphones and PDAs, thus giving users a truly mobile option.
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
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
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).
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..
I used to work for the Relay service and it was illegal to report ANYTHING short of a bomb threat on the facility you are currently working in. As far as the legality is concerned the relay agent is nothing more than a piece of the wire. They keep grief counselors on campus all the time because of some of the crap we had to relay.
Even judges can't legally compell agents to do anything other than relay the conversation. I had one attempt to swear me in once before he would let me relay the call. The manager of my center had to quote to law to the judge before he would give up on insisting I had to be sworn in.
(and since I wasn't actively relaying a conversation no this isn't confidential.)
Of course this may have changed since the whole terrorism acts but I doubt it. The advocates are relatively powerful for keeping agents as nothing more than a piece of the wire.
-- Proud member of the Jello Sex Cult.