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Sprint Cracks Down on TTY Relay Abuses
An anonymous reader writes "Sprint thinks it has found a way to keep West African scam artists from using Sprint's deaf-relay service to defraud people." Our previous two stories have background information.
Can someone tell me what's up with these west african countries? Nigeria for example, it's all over the scam radar, their area code is synonymous with scam.
How come we don't hear of scammers from Cuba, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, or any of america's historical and/or current enemies? Is it a media thing to drop west african country names when they refer to these kinds of scam?
Does Nigeria really have a monopoly on scamming stupid americans? Are their organized crime mobs this pathetic that the best they can come up with is phone and email scams? Why can't they go into drug trade or union corruption like a *real* mafia would?
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Sprint spokesman Steve Lunceford, would not detail how Sprint is trying to block the calls other than to say the company is looking at problematic Internet-protocol addresses and finding ways to block them before calls go through to operators.
So far, the effort appears successful. The volume of Internet-relay calls has returned to the level it was in early January, before massive abuse of the system began, Lunceford said.
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This is only a temporary fix. If they're blocking specific IP addresses, then the scammers will start using proxies. I suppose they could also start blocking anything from a proxy server, but there might be legitimate deaf people using Anonymizer or similar service that would no longer be able to get through.
Is it possible to tell whether a particular HTTP request is coming from a proxy server, without knowing the IP address? Perhaps there is a descriptor in the packet somewhere that says it is going to be forwarded beyond the "apparent" destination?
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
These TTY scams take up a ton of time for the person who answers the phone. We get about ten TTY scam calls per week, and about 1 legit deaf call per month. That adds up to a lot of wasted time.
And how do the deaf dial the 800 number without using tty? mmm?
"Piter, too, is dead."
So for an effective short term solution change these rules so that any operator who believes that it's a scam can (after some procedures have been followed) terminate the call.
Here on Slashdot, there's a strong "screw the rules" bent, as evidenced by the latest copy-protection crack.
So I'm surprised nobody's suggested that the operators simply tell the obvious scammers to go take a flying leap. What's the scammer going to do, report them? "Hello, my name is, um, let's call me John, and the TTY operator won't let me purchase the diamonds I so desperately need to acquire. By the way, can I have your checking account number so I can transfer my dead uncle's estate to a Swiss account?"
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
In the past, anyone who needed to use the tty system had to own a piece of hardware to communicate to the relay, however, now with internet based relay calls, they only need to access a computer hooked up to the net.
I think the requirement for specialized hardware is the key to ending the abuse of the system. My idea would be to use a device, where the relay gives you code, and then you input it into the device, and it spits out a response. This would still keep the calls anonymous, but, would add a level of security to stop the scammers.
I wasn't aware that deafness impaired pressing buttons on a keypad. How would they use TTY if they can't type?
I suppose there's a risk that they wouldn't know if they'd dialed a wrong number, and therefore might start keying in their login/pin at an incorrect number. Scammers would likely start registering all of the one-off numbers around that 800 number. Plenty of phones these days do display the number as you dial it though, so that's not insurmountable.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I still don't understand why people fall for these scams. As far as I'm concerned, it's a litmus test for stupidity. Anyone foolish enough to ship $30k worth of equipment to a person they don't know in a foreign country without checking the integrity of the transaction deserves to lose their money and learn from the experience.
One of the sites on my server is a classified ad site, and we've had several reports of people getting fleeced with the Nigerian forged-cashiers check overpayment scam. Again, why someone selling something would accept overpayment and then wire the difference back to the party or their agent is beyond stupidity. Ironically the best thing that could happen to these people is for them to get ripped off so some of that naivety will be summarily stripped from their barnacle-encrusted brains.
I'm not saying the scammers should be allowed to operate, but any action taken by "authorities" should be considered more of a favor for stupid people, than a responsibility. No amount of enforcement or technology will ultimately keep a fool and his money from being separated.
I was amazed to hear the guy at the local computer store tell me that they had problems with this. They were getting calls from people trying to order laptops with bad checks. He said they now ask the operator what areacode the caller is in and refuse any call not from the local area. I remember him saying that New York state was a big source of problems.
He also said that he expected this solution to be just a band-aid.