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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...."
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.
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.
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eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
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
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.
They will handle it, however they way that handle it is by forcing the merchant to give the money back to the person who's stolen card was used. Now the merchant is out moeny for falling for the scam (which is bad but partly their fault) and the deaf people still have long lines and a difficult time using services that are almost vital to them doing things you and I take for granted.