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Crime Cellphones United States

24 People Have Now Been Sentenced In India-Based Phone-Scam Case (arstechnica.com) 115

Posted by BeauHD from the long-distance-charges dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A total of 24 people who pleaded guilty to their involvement in a massive years-long phone scam often involving fake Internal Revenue Service and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services officials have now been given prison sentences from four to 20 years. The indictment was originally filed in October 2016 against 61 people and includes charges of conspiracy to commit identity theft, impersonation of an officer of the United States, wire fraud, and money laundering. If victims didn't pay up, callers threatened arrest, deportation, or heavier fines. There were also related scams involving fake payday loans and bogus U.S. government grants, according to the criminal complaint. The lead defendant was Miteshkumar Patel, who was given 20 years.
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24 People Have Now Been Sentenced In India-Based Phone-Scam Case More

24 People Have Now Been Sentenced In India-Based Phone-Scam Case

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  • A whole 24 people? That should solve the problem.

    • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @11:33PM (#57004572)

      A whole 24 people? That should solve the problem.

      The root of the problem is the American telecom companies that enable these scams by offering spoofing services to criminals. Some big fines on Verizon and AT&T would do way more good than going after some low level scammers in Mumbai.

      • ... snipsnip... Some big fines on Verizon and AT&T would do way more good than going after some low level scammers in Mumbai.

        No mod points now but if I had 'em you'ld get 'em all.

        • Re:Impressive (Score:4, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @03:37AM (#57005086)

          then you both have no clue. The feature that allows this to happen is actually a business feature utilised by millions of legitimate businesses. Unfortunately like many things in this world when it was built into phone systems throughout the world (this is not a US only problem) there wasn't much thought put on the security or potential abuses of the technology. Now it is hard to turn off without screwing over a fuck load of companies with legitimate reasons for using it.

          • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @04:13AM (#57005208)

            then you both have no clue. The feature that allows this to happen is actually a business feature utilised by millions of legitimate businesses.

            ...to trick their customers into thinking their call center is actually not in Bangalore. Yeah, what a noble cause.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              No, it was designed to present outgoing calls as originating from (for example) the main switchboard / reception phone number rather than the individual extensions (or nothing at all, in the early days).

              • And CreateRemoteThread was originally meant to facilitate writing drivers. Now guess what both inventions are hardly used for (because there are better ways to do that now) and what kind of use they have left.

                Hint: It's not a benign one.

              • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

                by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @05:59AM (#57005442)

                No, it was designed to present outgoing calls as originating from (for example) the main switchboard / reception phone number

                Spoofing from one number to another controlled by the same legal entity is reasonable. Allowing criminals to spoof a random phone number that they DO NOT OWN is not.

                The telecoms can shut this activity down very quickly if they are given sufficient financial incentive to do so, like maybe $10M per day in fines until it is fixed.

                • Spoofing from one number to another controlled by the same legal entity is reasonable

                  Such spoofing is already illegal — certainly against ToS, but impossible to enforce.

                  Just as spoofing of e-mail headers is.

                  And, frankly, I can't see, how it can be made properly illegal without violating the First Amendment... Except in a few special cases, it is not illegal to lie.

                • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • Big fucking deal. The whole issue is going to go the way of broadcast TV in the next decade-- if not sooner. Fucking landline holdover nonsense.

              Unless they can figure out how to spoof numbers in my (mental) contacts list, I never answer my "phone". In fact, my "phone" isn't even really a phone anymore, it's a VOIP device. My other "phone" is an extremely powerful computer that I carry in my pocket that has at least three apps on it for transmitting video and audio to people I want to talk to in real time.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by gnick ( 1211984 )

                If homeopathy shit can be sold in stores (especially in the medicine section), then why shouldn't phone scams that rely on called ID spoofing be legal too? Frankly, if you're dumb enough to fall for this shit you ought to have your voting privileges revoked.

                There are rules about what homeopathic shit can claim about their product. These phone scams are lies and threats. Many of the victims are elderly and not "dumb," just not savvy.

          • However such a service could be controled at the Telco level. To insure a call can be tracked back to its source.

            So a legitimate business will contact their telecom and say number xxx-xxx-xxxx will call and we would like to display the number as yyy-yyy-yyyy and zzz-zzz-zzzz

            Having the end user able to spoof on their own end, just doesn't cut it in 2018

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Twenty four in a population of 1.5 billion, and churning out IT people by the 100-thousands each year. For jobs they resort to working at a "call center." 24 - barely an atom-layer shave off an iceberg sized problem. Let me know when the calls have all stopped. And then you have Karachi, across the border - even more "call centers."

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by thej1nx ( 763573 )

          1.5 billion are not all criminals, thank you very much. But your racism is showing

      • If the Phone company knows where to send the bill, they should be able to tell the caller where the phone number is actually from. For legitimate phone spoofing such as a reminder call from an other company spoofed with your phone number so they can get back to you, can be handled with the phone company. Not from your own technology.

    • I would think this is just the low hanging fruit. The shakers and movers have moved on to restart their operations again.
      OOOO Authorities announce we caught these criminals. In order to look like they are making progress. This could just be for show like most everything the authorities do.

      Just my 2 cents ;)

  • Rookies (Score:3)

    by youngone ( 975102 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @11:16PM (#57004542)
    They made the mistake of being somewhere where they could be arrested.
    The Microsoft people who call my wife are pretty obviously in India.
    The investment scammers I have been getting lately are also calling from some third-world country I would think. I read somewhere Indonesia is popular.
    If they make enough money I'm sure it's not hard to bribe whoever they need to so they can stay in business.

    • I'm afraid the IT recruiters from India have also been out of control recently. Their poorly aimed and sometimes even fraudulent IT job calls have been interfering with normal recruiters, whom I refer to people in my fields who are looking for new work or promotions.

      • How do those scams make money? Do they get people desperate for work to pay them for a job opportunity or something?

        • Fraud can include work for which their is no intent to interview and hire, but merely collecting American resumes to reject and justify an H1B visa. Fraud can also include bulking out your candidate list, to get more names and more pay, by contacting completely unsuitable candidates. It can also include bait & switch, offering a lucrative job interview, getting the candidate to present resumes and commit to the interview, then offering a _much_ lower salary than was originally discussed, usually with a

  • ...about "contract employment firms" that call from New Jersey but everyone calling always has a heavy Indian accent...

    • Or the "Microsoft windows department" scam calls
      • I enjoy getting the scam calls, they used to annoy me but now I try to take them as a personal challenge for how long I can keep them on the line for wasting their time. I even have an Isolated VM I will give them access to if needed. Man the last one I had from the "windows department" a few weeks ago only lasted about 10 mins but you should have heard the tirade of abuse he yelled at me when he realised he was being led on, probably didn't help his emotional state when I started laughing at the abuse rath

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dwywit ( 1109409 )

          I used to enjoy them, my best was 16 minutes and screaming abuse at the end, but I got 4 in one day, so I blocked all incoming international calls. They dropped off for a while, but now they're spoofing local numbers. Sometimes I answer, sometimes I don't.

          I've got some hindi swear/abuse phrases ready to go (stuff like "you're the result of a toilet cleaner fucking a goat"), but my best was asking the girl from "Windows technical department" what her mother would think of her activities. She went silent for

          • try the tactic of asking in a sexy voice "what are you wearing" and other creepy stuff. Some of the stammering replies or total silence can be just as amusing. I am sure they have been abused and insulted so much that most of the insults just wash right over them so I like to try and get them off balance when I am looking to end the call quickly due to being busy. I am surprised they haven't got my number blocked in their systems as I must cost them a lot of time/money.

          • Re:Now if they could only do something... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <[ten.frow] [ta] [todhsals]> on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @03:47AM (#57005132)

            I used to enjoy them, my best was 16 minutes and screaming abuse at the end, but I got 4 in one day, so I blocked all incoming international calls. They dropped off for a while, but now they're spoofing local numbers. Sometimes I answer, sometimes I don't.

            I've got some hindi swear/abuse phrases ready to go (stuff like "you're the result of a toilet cleaner fucking a goat"), but my best was asking the girl from "Windows technical department" what her mother would think of her activities. She went silent for about 10 seconds, then hung up.

            Amateur. YouTube has a few people who can get scammers on the phone for at least an hour, approaching 4 and a half. Though to be honest, a good chunk of it is simply dead air - they ask the victim to go out and buy gift cards or something (which is good for a couple of hours of scammers on hold).

            And scammers have an "emergency out" - if they get exposed, they immediately lock the machine and syskey it to ensure it is unbootable. Of course, it all happens in a virtual machine, so restoring the damage is trivial, but it's funny.

            Some YouTube channels:
            Kitboga [youtube.com]. He's had scammers insult him, make death threats and all sorts of fun.

            This guy enacts revenge on the scammers by infecting their PC [youtube.com]. Most of the scammers are just doing a script, so their PCs are often wide open and infectable, so it's possible to get RATs and such installed on their PC.

            This guy investigates scammers computers [youtube.com]. His latest video involves a bank login scam where he manages to install a RAT on the scammer's computer. He watches as a scammer attempts to register for and log into some elderly guy's bank account (luckily, the bank actually sends something to customers when this happens, so the scammer not only had no chance. He also alerted the bank who locked the online account for fraud.

            Yes, it's fun watching scammer's computers and call centers get infected. Perhaps they can call themselves for tech support.

            I admit, I get a lot of those calls. It's amazing how they always use the most robotic of voices. Also, apparently retailers are alert to the scam as well - several times they've been stopped when they see people buying thousands of dollars worth of iTunes or other gift cards. Though, someone was so embarrassed they made up a whole story about being "arrested" and transported and caused the police to issue an alert [globalnews.ca].

          • My personal best is 46 minutes on the windows dude. I was doing some mind numbing work that I could still do the copy and pasting I needed to do while talking so I wasted very little of my time and a ton of his.

            I started with, hold on, computers are on the other side of the house, put the phone down for 5 minutes.

            He is still there, I ask which computer, I have 8? He says could be any so I say, let me turn them all on. This will take a while, some are really old and take a while to boot....put the phone d

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by swb ( 14022 )

            I'm just openly as offensive as I can possibly be. I find mixing race, class and nationality based insults together can really rile them up.

  • Good news, but I have been getting these "I'm from the IRS" scam calls a lot recently. Just another a few hours ago. So obviously that team isn't part of the 24 in the article.

    And it does answer a question I have had for a while -- do these creeps ever get caught and prosecuted? Apparently they can. So why not get all of them. It can't be that hard to trace them.

    But apparently it is a profitable venture. There is zero chance that I or anyone reading here would fall for their crude charade but I reall

    • I recently held a cyber-security discussion at a local retirement community. We went over a lot of ways to stay safe online (e.g. don't open file attachments, don't download programs from random sites, if the deal sounds too good to be true then it probably is). I also covered phone scams. My co-presenter had happened to get an IRS phone scam recently and still had it on her voicemail so we played it for them. The caller claimed to be from the IRS, said she owed money, and threatened my co-host with arrest

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I recently held a cyber-security discussion at a local retirement community. We went over a lot of ways to stay safe online (e.g. don't open file attachments, don't download programs from random sites, if the deal sounds too good to be true then it probably is). I also covered phone scams. My co-presenter had happened to get an IRS phone scam recently and still had it on her voicemail so we played it for them. The caller claimed to be from the IRS, said she owed money, and threatened my co-host with arrest

        • I think the scammers just rely on people being so frightened by "we're the IRS, pay us or the police are coming for you" that they don't bother thinking critically about the phone call. Also, a lot of these scammers use robocalling programs. It costs them next to nothing to call a hundred people claiming to be the IRS. If only one of those people is fooled and pays them, they have a profit.

          I can't remember offhand whether I went through the entire process that the IRS would take if you really owed them mone

    • Good news, but I have been getting these "I'm from the IRS" scam calls a lot recently.

      I've gotten those recently too - they leave these hilarious voicemails on my cellphone. The grammar is so god-awfully broken and illogical that I can't imagine anyone believes it to be official. I don't delete the voicemails because I play them for people for a laugh.

  • I Enjoy their calls (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It gives me a chance to press all the buttons on my phone!

    • You're wasting a perfectly good opportunity to troll a person in real life without any remorse or repercussions.

  • Do they think about this beforehand? (Score:3)

    by Peter P Peters ( 5350981 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @01:12AM (#57004796)
    I always wonder with these big scams, do the people creating them know that they're likely to get caught and spend decades in prison, or do they think they'll actually get away with it?
    I've come up with tons of get rich quick schemes/scams but the fear of lengthy jail time has always kept me honest. Is the only difference that these people don't think enough bout the risks of such ventures in advance? Or do they get years into it, then one day wake and think oh shit, we might got to jail for this but it's too late?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      If you consider that your life options are:
      a) live in prison-like conditions your whole life, or
      b) take a risk you might spend some time in actual prison, while making enough money in the meanwhile to live in conditions substantially better than squalor
      Then option B sure sounds like an upgrade. Bury some of your money so it can't all be reclaimed, and you and your family are set. However, I bet those in prison who buried the large notes that're no longer accepted are kicking themselves for not using smaller

    • They likely think they won't get caught so they mentally reduce "risk of arrest" to zero and raise "chance of making money" to 100. An unhealthy lack of morals and basic human empathy help also. I've often said that I could have been very rich had it not been for my pesky morals.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I always wonder with these big scams, do the people creating them know that they're likely to get caught and spend decades in prison, or do they think they'll actually get away with it?

      I'm pretty sure they think that they can't get caught because they are smarter than those dumb guys who got caught. Also, in some places you may simply be able to bribe your way out of trouble because the government doesn't prosecute people who take bribes. There's probably some thought that once they get rich, they can stop the scamming because they won't need to do it any more, but that target value of what exactly is "rich" continues to move beyond them. And it probably doesn't help when we read stori

  • Well, that was foolish.

    They should have taken that initial offer on the first call to pay by credit card right then and there to avoid arrest, being experts on that and all . . . :)

    hawk

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