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More on Scammers Abusing TTY Services

Posted by michael on from the low-down-no-good-dirty-rotten-scoundrels dept.

edward ericson writes "A more comprehensive look at IP Relay scams and their effect on relay operators, the deaf, US business and the relay providers like Sprint, AT&T and MCI. Unlike a previous piece in the AZ Star, this one shows that the problem is at least a year old, and estimates that the companies have earned at least $23 million by facilitating scams. Anyone here care to discuss IP blocking techniques?" See our previous story for more.

5 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. I have personal experience with this stuff... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work overnights in a call center, doing mostly tech support, but I am in a overflow buffer for a customer service/retail catalog. These calls are some crazy stuff. They take forever, the person is slow to respond, always wants the item shipped right now, before we run the credit card. It's always obscene amounts of stuff too. For example they may call and ask for one thing, and you say we are out, then they take the next item up, 5-10 of them. They are items that people would never buy more than 1 of, maybe 2. Does the company care? The outsourcing company doesn't, they are getting paid per call. The retailer, doesn't seem to care as much as they should. I don't know how various write-offs work, but my guess is they probably use this in their taxes, the fraud loss I mean. The relay(phone) companies need to put a stop to this.

  2. Dealing with scammers in a business environment by sloveless · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am currently employed by an online retailer. We've been dealing with this problem for at least TWO years. The basic scenario goes something like this: we receive an order placed online with an obscene total, next day shipping, a yahoo email addy, or a combination of other flags that tell us it's fraud. The credit card address verification always comes back "does not match" in these cases. Then we send them a polite email stating that we can't process their order any further until the address does match. Within minutes the call center receives a call from an IP relay operator. Occasionally, they don't identify themselves as IP operators. So we always ask "Is this an IP relay call?" So far, they've never denied it. (In the last two years we've documented ONE TTY call.) At this point we accept the call and then explain to the scammer that we can't accept IP relay calls and that they should send us an email. Shortly thereafter we get an email from a different yahoo account that reads like a 419 scam. It's fun.

    Basically, the theory is that if someone is legitimately using the service, they're perfectly capable of sending email. The benefit is that we minimize the time spent dealing with scammers.

    If anyone else has methods of dealing with this nonsense, I'd love to hear it.

    1. Re:Dealing with scammers in a business environment by llywrch · · Score: 4, Interesting

      > If anyone else has methods of dealing with this nonsense, I'd love to hear it.

      I work part-time for a mail/telephone/internet catalog company, & handling the orders that came in by mail (which still accounts for about 10-15% of total sales last Xmas season) was an eye-opener about fraud. However, most of the possible cases stick out like a sore thumb. Typical clues:

      *The addresses for where the catalog was delivered, the address on the check, & where the person wants to ship the order don't match. Bonus clue when the address the catalog was delivered is thoroughly scribbled out, as if to hide where the catalog was originally sent.
      *Potential customer pays with one of those starter checks you get when you open an account.
      *Customer orders stuff that can be easily fenced: usually this means electronics, but jewelry falls into this catagory too. (My employer doensn't sell jewelry.)
      *Addition skills a first-grader would be embarassed over. (I had one chucklehead who rounded up on all of the prices -- $19.00 became $20.00, $27.50 became $30.00 -- & added an extra $20 on top of that, apparently because he still didn't have a firm grasp on this form of higher mathematics. I passed it to someone to research, & only later realised what was going on.)
      *Potential customer has got to have it overnight. (Sheesh, if you need it that soon, why didn't you give us a call & use a credit card?)

      Since it's always possible that an honest, real customer can do some, many, or all of these things, any suspicious order was passed to a senior employee who'd compare the names on the order against our database of customers to see if they'd tried this before, & a list of known fraud artists (retailers share this information), & then call to verify funds. If it passed all of these tests, then the order would be entered into the system to be filled.

      (One item that shocked the **** outta me was that a fair percentage of people had their Social Security Number printed on their checks. For the few who don't know, the SSN is the skeleton key to an US citizen's credit history.)

      Most of these methods are detailed in the original article, but it's amazing that a small amount of skepticism will block a large number of the scams. Based on that, I'd say that if a veteran TTY operator thinks a call is fraud, they're probably right.

      Geoff

      --
      I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
  3. Credit card companies' fraud handling is broken by LinuxParanoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's likewise crazy about online fraud to me is the following scenario.

    As an online merchant, we see online orders that are clearly fraudulent. But the credit card still goes through (we 'authorize' first which just deducts from your credit limit). We decide not to take the order; thus we don't do a 'capture' on the card that would deduct the money from the poor guy's credit card account. That way we avoid getting charge-backs that would ruin our merchant rating and that would cost us in the end anyway (if caught). But we do log that credit card # in our database. Sometimes SIX MONTHS LATER the fraudster will use that same credit card # on our site again and it is *still* being accepted by Visa/Mastercard!

    This is a broken system. As a merchant, we have no way (that I know of) to warn Visa/MasterCard or the issuing bank or the card holder that the number is being used for fraud! (Besides just going ahead and charging the card, knowing its fraud.) Certainly not an automated way to do so in the same way that we connect to payment gateways. It's just not in Visa's/Mastercard's interest to put a system in place because at the end of the day, the merchant is liable.

    I'm interested if anyone knows of a place where merchants can swap info about fraudulent cards or other fraud data.

    --LP

  4. Re:Learn something new every day. by awtbfb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are some perfectly legal things they can do to make these calls as poor quality as possible. For example, relay operators are allowed to hand the call off to another operator (e.g., use the bathroom in the middle of a long call, etc). They can also speak the text with long pauses between words, etc. Driving the quality of service for these types of calls down would very quickly make the mark less willing to stay on the line. However, this would give the relay a bad name in the hearing community.

    Alternatively, CAs are allowed to deliver a short instruction about the service. One could easily imagine a modification: "Have you ever used the relay before? ... No?... (stock explaination, follwed by) Please be aware that some calls placed through the relay are overseas fraud. Operators are not allowed to terminate calls but if you suspect fraud at any time, you may hang up..."