Can't edit comments that old, but I feel like my first sentence was perfectly appropriate given the parents appeal to authority ("I built telecommunications systems / software for some time").
I wouldn't call that an appeal to authority? but even if it were, your comments need to follow the site guidelines regardless of what other commenters are doing. You broke them badly above.
You don't see how that's an appeal to authority, I don't see how my comment violated the site guidelines. I wasn't name-calling or swiping at anyone, I was merely refuting the parents appeal to authority.
If you tell me you don't see how "You've completely missed the mark" breaks the site guidelines, I guess I can see how that's borderline. But "you have no clue whatsoever"? That's a straightforward attack/swipe of exactly the sort you're asked not to post here!
I think you missed the point the previous poster was making: These non-US-based scams generate a ton of revenue for telcos, which is why they are not incented to stop them.
I don't know anything about it, just trying to clarify what (I think) previous poster meant.
PaybackTony literally said "It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing." and went on to explain how calling in EU is much more expensive. I think it's safe to assume that he just didn't think this through.
By absolute numbers, I do believe OP is correct. In Germany, we do have a problem with phone based scams as well, but since we have modern ways of transferring money (SEPA wire transfers / direct debit) and actually useful identity cards that make opening fake bank accounts for mules very difficult, almost all scams rely on personal contact instead - the most common scheme is fake policemen, where the callcenter will call elderly people and pressure them to go to their bank to draw cash, then a "policeman" shows up at the door and takes the cash.
It costs like 100 euros to buy a fake ID that'll work at any bank in Germany. This is a bizarre trope oft-repeated on HN by techies who think that banks actually verify chipped ID cards, they do not. And even if they did, they have to accept a plenty of EU IDs which do not have chips.
Google and look at how a Greek ID card looks like, it's literally a piece of paper.
> opening fake bank accounts for mules very difficult
Are you being sarcastic? https://crimemarket.is/ ctrl-f for BD, there are literally hundreds of people offering german bank accounts.
On the same forum you will find people selling Kleinanzeigen accounts, and DHL insiders creating fake tracking IDs for Kleinanzeigen scams.
> almost all scams rely on personal contact instead - the most common scheme is fake policemen, where the callcenter will call elderly people and pressure them to go to their bank to draw cash, then a "policeman" shows up at the door and takes the cash.
This isn't true at all. Those scams happen, but they're the minority. You can search for "OB Cashing" on crimemarket, that's the term of art they use for calling up grandmothers and convincing them to empty their bank accounts.
> It costs like 100 euros to buy a fake ID that'll work at any bank in Germany. This is a bizarre trope oft-repeated on HN by techies who think that banks actually verify chipped ID cards, they do not. And even if they did, they have to accept a plenty of EU IDs which do not have chips.
I'm not talking about the eID chip, that isn't verified indeed - but at least in my experience, when opening a bank account in person, they do diligent checks, for non-German cards they even have a database how different nations' ID cards should look like and what the security markings are.
Video-Ident aka holding your ID card into your webcam is indeed vulnerable, and banks like N26 got in really hot water, which forced them to ramp up their anti-fraud measures to a degree even legitimate customers got massively impacted [1].
> On the same forum you will find people selling Kleinanzeigen accounts, and DHL insiders creating fake tracking IDs for Kleinanzeigen scams.
Yes, dark markets exist. But their scale, still, is vastly lower than the US, where you have shit like virtually all Americans' information being sold online that is necessary to open lines of credit and do other kinds of fraud. Stuff like tax refund scams or SSN's being abused by illegal immigrants simply does not exist here (again: at least not at a relevant scale), because we have modern systems in place.
> This isn't true at all. Those scams happen, but they're the minority. You can search for "OB Cashing" on crimemarket, that's the term of art they use for calling up grandmothers and convincing them to empty their bank accounts.
The classic scams are the majority, and yet even these they yield the scammers only something like 13 million euros a year [2], that's laughable compared to the amount Americans lose, even if one assumes that only a tenth of the cases gets reported at all.
And again: entire classes of scams like "I got arrested and need bail money" or "I was involved in a traffic accident and need to pay the hospital cash advance for treatment" don't work here because we don't have cash bail or bills from hospitals and people know that. If you would try this scam on any European, they'd laugh you off because they know that this doesn't exist.
>but at least in my experience, when opening a bank account in person, they do diligent checks
Most banks don't even have UV lights, not that fake IDs don't usually have decent UV markings anyway. Hardly very diligent.
>for non-German cards they even have a database how different nations' ID cards should look like and what the security markings are.
As do essentially all banks in the world, doesn't save you though. Many European IDs (Romanian, Greek for example) do not have any meaningful security features, Romanian IDs can look completely different depending on which day and which city they're printed in and there's no reference guide for this.
>Video-Ident aka holding your ID card into your webcam is indeed vulnerable, and banks like N26 got in really hot water, which forced them to ramp up their anti-fraud measures to a degree even legitimate customers got massively impacted [1].
Pretty much any fake ID that'll pass Video-Ident will generally work at the bank too.
>The classic scams are the majority, and yet even these they yield the scammers only something like 13 million euros a year [2], that's laughable compared to the amount Americans lose, even if one assumes that only a tenth of the cases gets reported at all.
This is totally wrong, there are individual people running car-selling scams on mobile.de netting more than that.
>And again: entire classes of scams like "I got arrested and need bail money" or "I was involved in a traffic accident and need to pay the hospital cash advance for treatment" don't work here because we don't have cash bail or bills from hospitals and people know that. If you would try this scam on any European, they'd laugh you off because they know that this doesn't exist.
Those scams are common in the US and UK, but they only make up a small part of the $ losses. The bulk of the losses comes in the form of people losing all of their savings as their bank account is emptied.
At one point I worked on the very systems they used (dialers, PBX, internal CRMs), with the carriers that enabled it. This wasn't an opinion of mine, I was merely passing along real-world information from someone who worked in the industry (me). Many in this thread completely underestimate the volume these centers call at. We aren't talking hundreds of thousands of minutes per month per center. We're talking millions of minutes. Cost per minute is a massive cost
even at 1/6 increments. The call center we ran, that was direct marketing / support typically had telecom bills well into the 6 figures every month at the height.
Their scams are purposefully asinine. It's not profitable to spend time and effort into tricking the wise into an unwise act. It's far more profitable searching for the unwise to act in kind. So when you throw your hands up asking "Who would fall for that!?" The answer is typically: Someone who'd be willing to buy a gift card or share bank account info. This contradicts your last point that a given locale is more or less likely to be scammed given the native language.
Language barriers are a part of the issue, yes, but these centers are capable of calling and speaking a number of languages. Cost and regulation are the big factors here. Just like any other business model. I got out of the business (telecom / direct marketing saas) right when EU started raising fees and coming down on some of the bad actors. Unfortunately for the US, that meant those bad actors focused even more in the US.
Also, the scams really aren't as profitable as you'd think most of the time. They generally can't afford more than a $50 CPA at best. Again, they have to turn heavy volume to get to their target market. They also rotate "offers". You hear about the big "wins" a lot (Grandma scammed for 50k+) but those are outliers. Typically it's $20 here, $100 there. Again, volume.
>Their scams are purposefully asinine. It's not profitable to spend time and effort into tricking the wise into an unwise act. It's far more profitable searching for the unwise to act in kind. So when you throw your hands up asking "Who would fall for that!?" The answer is typically: Someone who'd be willing to buy a gift card or share bank account info. This contradicts your last point that a given locale is more or less likely to be scammed given the native language.
You're severely underestimating the success rate of these calls.
> Typically it's $20 here, $100 there. Again, volume
This is perplexing, even the gift card scams don't target such low amounts. The only logical conclusion is that we're talking about completely different kinds of scams.
The kinds of scams targeting amounts you speak of tend to be slightly less obvious ones, selling bullshit services and actually running credit cards. These operations often aren't even necessarily criminal, beyond perhaps the spammy part.
> You hear about the big "wins" a lot (Grandma scammed for 50k+) but those are outliers.
Nah, those are the bulk of this $10B figure. Tricking a grandma to install teamviewer and emptying her account isn't much of a challenge.
> You might have telco experience, but you have no clue whatsoever about the economics of these scams.
Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of what they said.
Furthermore, saying "it makes no difference to the scammers if they're paying 10c per minute or calling for free" shows an equally clear failure to understand the economics of these scams. The vast majority of calls made by a scammer will yield nothing. They have to make numerous calls to find the one sucker who can be convinced to turn over their financial information or mail cash or do whatever needs to be done. I don't know the exact per-minute cost at which most scams become cost prohibitive, but I'm pretty sure you'd be shocked at how little it is. If it takes 2,000 calls to find one victim, and you're paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend $200 per victim. Will you make that much back, and will it be enough to offset all of the other costs involved in trolling? It depends. But it definitely makes it less appetizing than when the calls are free.
You're correct that some of the scams yield hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like I said, I knew someone to whom that happened. However, most scammers look for smaller payouts in quantity. Think of ransomware that make it look like your computer is full of viruses just so they can "sell" the uninstaller for a few hundred bucks. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of these incidents for every one incident involving a large $100K+ payout.
It makes sense, given that people are willing to act a lot more independently (without consulting others) when only a small amount is on the line, they often won't admit to these missteps out of embarrassment, AND, perhaps most importantly, it won't raise the ire of federal law enforcement enough to be concerned about things like extradition and prosecution.
> You're correct that some of the scams yield hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like I said, I knew someone to whom that happened. However, most scammers look for smaller payouts in quantity. Think of ransomware that make it look like your computer is full of viruses just so they can "sell" the uninstaller for a few hundred bucks.
Those are the exact scammers who will get you to install teamviewer/anydesk and use it to empty your bank account, with the $100 charge just working as a distraction. You can find videos showing how these scams work on youtube.
Of course lots of people won't have $100k or even $10k in their bank account, the scammers will just send those people out to buy gift cards or similar instead of wasting their drop accounts.
Even if only one in 1000 calls returns $100k, they're still averaging $100 per call.
yes, that's the one. i remember the first time reading about it and thought Klingon or Elvish would have been a better choice, but alas, i'm not a linguist
