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After Microsoft Complaints, Indian Police Arrest Tech Support Scammers At 26 Call Centers (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: New Delhi police have arrested 63 suspects in the last two months working and operating 26 call centers that were engaging in tech support scams, posing as tech support staff at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other major tech companies. The raids on Delhi-based call centers have taken place over the last two months, Microsoft said. Police first raided 10 call centers and arrested 24 people in October, and then raided 16 other call centers and made 39 more arrests this week.
Microsoft said its staff received over 7,000 victim reports associated with the 16 call centers raided this week, from over 15 countries. Users reported paying between $100 and $500 for unnecessary tech support services and products. The raids resulted in the seizure of substantial evidence including call scripts, live chats, voice call recordings and customer records from tech support fraud operations, Microsoft said. The Delhi police's crackdown on tech support call centers came after Microsoft filed legal complaints earlier this year. Microsoft has been collecting customer complaints about tech support scams since 2014, via its "Report a technical support scam" portal.
Microsoft said its staff received over 7,000 victim reports associated with the 16 call centers raided this week, from over 15 countries. Users reported paying between $100 and $500 for unnecessary tech support services and products. The raids resulted in the seizure of substantial evidence including call scripts, live chats, voice call recordings and customer records from tech support fraud operations, Microsoft said. The Delhi police's crackdown on tech support call centers came after Microsoft filed legal complaints earlier this year. Microsoft has been collecting customer complaints about tech support scams since 2014, via its "Report a technical support scam" portal.
read in Indian English accent: "not good, not good, not good"
It was so obviously a scam that my only response was "Do you really expect me to fall for this?" His response? "Yes." Points for honesty, I guess.
And someone will just set up shop in another call centre, or in an apartment, or whatever ... and they'll just keep doing it.
The only way to stop this shit is to fix the utterly broken caller ID system which allows spoofing .. which was more or less demanded by the companies who outsourced jobs to these exact same call centres in the first place.
See, they wanted to have the number displayed as if it came from their published number, and thereby created all that was required for these scams to work.
Let's stop pretending there is any legitimate reason for caller ID spoofing and block this shit for real. I don't care about companies who want their telemarketers to seem to be calling from a legit number if it creates the conditions for these scams to thrive. The companies who claim a legitimate need for caller ID spoofing basically built the infrastructure for these scams.
Hell, I've seen scam calls coming in from my own number.
Pretty much any incoming call I don't know the number I have to assume is fraudulent, because 99% of the time, it is.
Fuck telemarketers, get a real job and fuck off.
Preying on old people. They should all die in a fire.
Like this one time time
Are you not the country that prides itself of not wanting a large government intervening in citizens affairs, and who prefers everything to be done by private companies?
Having setup the Lenny bot on my phone switch for a way to deal with these guys, looks like it will be a while before I get to hear Lenny drive them to despair again. The last recording I got it sounded like the scammer was about to cry "Please sir, just turn on your computer...".
Both of our governments could hit the potential labor pool pretty hard by having the Indian government extradite the offenders and then issue proclamations across their media that amount to a worst possible scenario under federal law.
Do that a few times with our government not issuing press releases on the arrests and trial outcomes and there will be little information to dissuade people in India that those guys didn't get fucked good and hard.
The IRS scammers would particularly fun because Impersonating a Federal Agent carries up to 5 years on its own on top of the wire fraud charges.
You can expect that to be good for a week or two, before they are replaced.
I didn't get my weekly 'This is Windows calling' phone call.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
That turns out not to be true. Numerous scams have been traced to Indian sources. CBC Marketplace actually traced one group of scammers right to the actual physical call centre address. The relevant Indian police politely told them to piss off even though they had actual evidence.
I suspect the actual reason action happened in this case is that Microsoft provided sufficient "consideration" which exceeded similar "consideration" from the scammers.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
How long have these scams being going on? Ten years?
The more scammy shit I hear come out of India, the more India starts sounding like China if China was smoking weed all the time, thus kinda laid-back and lazy about being evil.
Trump should have ordered a drone strike on these call centers. That would have taught these assholes a lesson for stealing money from the elderly (and stupid millennials).
So not only are the blue hairs falling suckers here in US, its also the IT know-alls lol... TG Russia sticks to politics...if they scam for $, we are all so screwed !
I predict lots of infighting in your party over what to cut and what to tax.
If you are bored there are plenty of youtube videos that show how best to handle the phone scammers. Some are quite amusing.
for example: https://www.youtube.com/result...
The egregious perfidy of the scammers is readily apparent in most of these videos. From their point of view they are just doing a regular job and get genuinely upset if anyone calls them on it.
Meanwhile, why isn't the IRS taking action? I got 6 calls in one day from "The IRS" telling me to settle the matter or I would be arrested by "the local cops" in one day.
The New York Attorney General's office should also file a complaint.
You were modded down but if I had mod points I would try and correct it. These scumbags pray on the elderly as their primarily target, they have no morals, mercy or sympathy for their victims and will happily wring them dry leaving them destitute if they can and the second they are free they will start up the exact same scam again.
The people on the phones are the poor schmucks with advanced degrees that can't get jobs or H1Bs. I'm willing to let them off with minor time and fees. However, the responsible people running the show need to meet Mr Bonesaw in a quiet room in the Saudi Embassy.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I have a landline since I need it to get ADSL2+ but I dont even have a phone plugged in so any attempts from scammers to call me on the landline will get nowhere. And I have never gotten such a call on my mobile either.
I do still see the ads for the scammers though (the ones with the annoying computer generated "critical alert from microsoft" audio and the popups that are impossible to click out of and such). When I see them I try my best to report them via "report deceptive site" so they can be blocked by whatever backend is being used for that but I have no idea if its helping or not.