Two days ago, my colleague Bob and I were chatting on the balcony and we talked about the recent anti-fraud promotion in China.
Bob has some experience in the United States. He said that the phone scams in the United States are no less than those in China. He encountered several fraudulent calls when he was in the United States.
For example, one day, Bob received a phone call. The other person spoke English with a strong curry flavor and asked Bob if his computer occasionally jammed.
In that era, computer novices would have more or less such problems after using their computers for a long time.
Bob is not a computer novice, and there is nothing wrong with the computer, but he realized that something was wrong and wanted to see what kind of cool operation this guy wanted to do, so he answered "yes" without conscience.
The other person was very happy to hear this answer and said, "Don't wolli, I vill help U!" (Indian accent version, don't worry, I will help you!)
Then he started to guide Bob to a To download a certain software from the website, blahblah said a lot, and finally asked, "You understand?"
It is naturally impossible for Bob to fall for this low-level phishing software trick. He is very disappointed with the trick of his Indian buddy.
So he decided to end the topic and told the other person, "I major in computer science and I can solve it myself." The other person was so angry that he couldn't speak and hung up the phone.
I praised Bob’s anti-fraud awareness. He shook his head humbly and said that it was mainly because the guy’s Indian accent made him wary. After all, white people don’t bother to do this, and black people generally can’t do this. . .
In fact, Bob’s experience can reflect to a certain extent how rampant phone fraud cases are in the United States.
According to a survey conducted by an app called Truecaller, phone fraud has become more and more serious in the United States in recent years. In 2020 alone, 56 million Americans were deceived, with total losses reaching $19.7 billion.
6 million people, they account for about 22% of the population of the United States, and these are the ones who have definitely been defrauded of their money.
According to the survey, 30% of people in the United States have been defrauded by phone scams, and 17% of them have been "scammed several times" . . .
As we all know, negative reviewers are professionally trained and generally will not laugh when commenting on such serious matters unless they cannot help themselves.
So when I saw this data, people were dumbfounded. Isn’t this American’s heart too big? Is it really just a boy who spreads his wealth per capita?
According to a data reported by " New York Times ", phone scams from India are the main force.
The entire phone fraud industry in India has an annual "output value" of up to US$28 billion, and approximately 1.2 million people are engaged in phone fraud.
At the end of 2020, the police took down a call center in New Delhi, India. More than 50 people alone defrauded more than 14 million US dollars in the United States.
On the official website of the US Department of Justice, you can also see cases about phone fraud in India. As early as 2013, there were people in India doing this. It really has a long history.
So the question is, why has phone fraud in India developed into such a huge industry?
The big Western companies are mainly to blame for this matter.
As we all know, India is a country with a large population, and it is also a country with a large population that uses English as one of its official languages.
Google , Microsoft and other large companies have money, but the cost of recruiting people as customer service in their own countries is too high, so they set their sights on India, which is not so rich but has a lot of people.
Many large companies have set up manual customer service call centers in India and adopted "training and on-the-job" methods to correct their accent and grammatical habits.
This high-end foreign company outsourcing job is a good way out for many poor Indians . After all, its threshold is also very low. They are all Indians. Who can't speak a few words in English?
As a result, a large number of people have received on-the-job training, and manual customer service has even become a career that many people dream of.
Picture source: @正解组▼
But training is training, and there are only so many positions after all. The remaining people who have been trained but cannot go to work have thought of the crooked way of phone fraud, and this way can make money faster than being a customer service too much.
In addition, India has a large population and fierce competition for employment. Every year, educational institutions train a large number of software engineers, but only 20% of them can find serious jobs.
Some of the remaining people are providing "technical support" for phone scams, such as using crawler software to obtain the victim's personal information, etc.
In addition to manual work and technology, phone scams in India are the same as phone scams in Southeast Asia. They will use different scams based on the characteristics of the American population.
For example, there is a refund scam specifically targeting the elderly, telling them that there is a refund available, but there is a problem with the bank transfer system here.
then proposed the need to remotely control the elderly person's computer to log into the online bank account, pretending to transfer money to the elderly person, but in fact only modified the displayed amount by modifying the front-end code of the web page.
then told the old man that they had accidentally transferred too much money and needed the old man to transfer the money back, launching a wave of empty-handed tricks.
For those old people who don’t understand code, it is easy to believe them and then be defrauded of money.
There is also the computer technical support scam (the kind Bob has encountered). uses phishing websites to induce others to download Trojan horse programs and steal bank account passwords.
Or you can use hacking methods to hack into the victim's computer and blackmail you. If you don't pay, you will have to wait for your nude photos to be seen by the entire Internet.
Targets young people, they will use other deceptions, such as the threat of drug dealing.
Since a large proportion of young people in the United States have been exposed to drugs such as marijuana, these scammers will pretend to be staff of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and claim to have found his bank account with the drug cartel. At the same time,
will also tell the victim his real address, making the victim panic▼
then tells the victim that he will be arrested and put in jail unless he pays money.
Faced with such a serious accusation, these young people naturally couldn't grasp it and paid the money on the spot without having time to think about it.
Some of these scams even target immigrants who have just arrived in the United States. Scammers will call these new immigrants and pretend to be from the tax bureau, claiming that they evade taxes.
The penalties for tax evasion in the United States are very serious. The key is that there are many miscellaneous taxes. Many newcomers do not know whether they have omitted to pay, so they are deceived by scammers.
Recently, due to the epidemic, there are not enough hospital beds and oxygen machines in the United States. India has also invented a scam to sell oxygen bottles . The money is paid first and the goods are shipped later. The victim disappears as soon as he transfers the money, which has deceived many people.
The entire Twitter is full of people reporting scams related to the epidemic. This one is a fire extinguisher changed into an oxygen tank ▼
In fact, these scams have flaws. For example, some scammers even ask victims to go through apple Paying "penalty" for Google Play Store gift cards, Bitcoin, etc. is very problematic at first glance.
But the key to all deceptions is to make "the authorities obsessed". From a God's perspective, we naturally feel that this kind of deception is not very effective, but we cannot be sure that we will not be fooled if we are in the position of the victim.
For example, a colleague in our editorial department was defrauded of 40,000 yuan after being hungover one day.
Since Indian phone scams are so popular in the United States, why don’t the U.S. officials start a cleanup? Because transnational law enforcement is quite difficult.
The nature of this matter is that the Indians are the ones committing the fraud, and India needs to cooperate in arresting them, and the Americans are the ones being deceived, and the victims in the United States need to file a lawsuit.
When those Indians are caught, the local court will need evidence to sentence these people, such as the transfer records of the victims here in the United States, and it cannot be just a random victim, it must be those who were caught cheating. past victims.
This directly made it difficult for the police on both sides to do their jobs. In addition, they did not pay enough attention to it, and everyone was passive and sabotaging their work.
Officials did not act, but some private forces in the United States launched resistance.
The most famous one is the YouTube UP owner Jim Browning.
He is a technically powerful hacker who has uploaded a lot of content on YouTube about overseas fraud he discovered seven years ago.
In recent years, due to the increasing number of phone scams in India, he has also focused his attention on this.
He once hacked into the computer camera of an Indian fraud call center and recorded the entire crime process of the fraudster.
Based on the IP address of this computer, he also located the location of this studio, which is located in Kolkata, India, and even found out the specific building.
In addition, he also conducted a wave of "retaliation" against many phone scammers, making a video, pretending to be deceived, and allowing the scammers to connect to him remotely.
Then show the scammer the photos he collected early about the scammer’s true identity, such as his place of work.
asked the scammer if he recognized this computer, and then asked if it was familiar to him? ▼
and the tools he usually uses.
He also asked for some specific information about the photos, such as where he took the photos. It turned out that the scammer was still lying, saying that he took the photos on a company computer.
Jim: You are taking a picture of your laptop screen.
Liar: Ah this. . . %^&$ , yes that’s right.(Frustrated) ▼
Jim ruthlessly exposed the fact that he took the photos at his own home, and told him that the photos were location-based, which meant that the scammer’s home address had been exposed.
The scammer immediately panicked, turned off the photo on the spot, and cut off the call.
Jim: You are committing fraud in your own home and you have just been lying.
Liar: I don’t have it, sir. . . ▼
I can only say that Jim, after watching this video, it really makes me feel refreshed, old Murong Fu!
Jim has a lot of real information on Indian fraudsters, and even obtained the ID cards of many people.
He sometimes cooperates with other YouTubers UP (such as Scammer Payback) to carry out his own justice in a "Robin Hood" way.
For example, they pretend to be deceived, remotely connect with the scammer, and then use the goose on the screen to take out the scammer's ID card bit by bit in front of the scammer.
Scammer Payback will also live broadcast "catching" scammers and playing tricks on scammers, which makes people feel very happy after watching it.
Up owners like Jim Browning and Scammer Payback who focus on anti-fraud have many fans on YouTube, and each video has at least millions of views.
People who have seen these videos are naturally lucky. They have a high probability of avoiding phone scams.
But there are more people who are unaware of this and are still being deceived by phone scams.
With the development of the Internet, more and more gray industries have shown a "regional" distribution characteristic, such as the phone fraud industry in Southeast Asia and India.
Criminals take advantage of the convenience of the Internet to commit transnational crimes, avoid risks, and commit fraud on a global scale.
Should the law keep up with the times and introduce relevant international regulations to combat these related scams?
