UN Says Asian Scam Call Center Epidemic Expanding Globally Amid Political Heat (theregister.com) 49
The UN warns that scam call centers, once concentrated in Southeast Asia, are rapidly expanding worldwide like a "cancer" as organized crime groups exploit weak governance in regions like Africa, South America, the Pacific Islands, and parts of Europe. The Register reports: Previous UN reports flagged growing activity in regions like South America and the Middle East. The latest update expands that scope, citing overseas crackdowns and evidence of scam operations tied to Southeast Asian crime syndicates in Africa, South Asia, select Pacific islands, and links to related criminal services -- such as laundering and recruitment -- as far as Europe, North America, and beyond. These spillover sites, as the UN calls them, allow Asian OCGs to expand their pool of victims by hiring/trafficking locals with different language skills and "dramatically scale up profits," according to the UN's latest report [PDF].
"We are seeing a global expansion of East and Southeast Asian organized crime groups," said Benedikt Hofmann, acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). "This reflects both a natural expansion as the industry grows and seeks new ways and places to do business, but also a hedging strategy against future risks should disruption continue and intensify in the region." Previously, the hotspots for this type of activity have been in places like Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Laos since 2021 when the UN and Interpol started tracking the phenomenon.
"It spreads like a cancer," Hofmann added. "Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply migrate. This has resulted in a situation in which the region has essentially become an interconnected ecosystem, driven by sophisticated syndicates freely exploiting vulnerabilities, jeopardizing state sovereignty, and distorting and corrupting policy-making processes and other government systems and institutions." The UN said these scam gangs typically relocate to jurisdictions with weak governance, allowing them to expand operations -- and rake in between $27.4 and $36.5 billion annually, according to estimates based on labour force size and average haul per scammer.
"We are seeing a global expansion of East and Southeast Asian organized crime groups," said Benedikt Hofmann, acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). "This reflects both a natural expansion as the industry grows and seeks new ways and places to do business, but also a hedging strategy against future risks should disruption continue and intensify in the region." Previously, the hotspots for this type of activity have been in places like Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Laos since 2021 when the UN and Interpol started tracking the phenomenon.
"It spreads like a cancer," Hofmann added. "Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply migrate. This has resulted in a situation in which the region has essentially become an interconnected ecosystem, driven by sophisticated syndicates freely exploiting vulnerabilities, jeopardizing state sovereignty, and distorting and corrupting policy-making processes and other government systems and institutions." The UN said these scam gangs typically relocate to jurisdictions with weak governance, allowing them to expand operations -- and rake in between $27.4 and $36.5 billion annually, according to estimates based on labour force size and average haul per scammer.
Easy to thwart (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: yeah except (Score:3)
Then get a business phone number and never answer outside of business hours. Never, ever use a personal phone number for business.
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No, you don't have to answer. If FEMA or the Red Cross or your insurance company calls you, and you don't answer, they will leave a message.
If you're a business, then yes, sorry about that.
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Lots of outfits will not leave a message because they are governed by confidentiality law.
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Confidentiality never prevents the caller from leaving a name and number to call back. Not HIPAA, not PII, not anything.
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Sometimes people have medical issues and they absolutely have to answer the phone every single time, regardless of whether they recognize the number or not because it might be a literal matter of life and death.
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That's a real stretch. Answer the phone because your life depends on it? Really? What kind of scenario would require you to answer the phone, or you die?
Maybe somebody has a pacemaker that calls you every 30 minutes to see if you are alive, and if you don't answer, it shuts itself down? Yeah I'd answer the phone in that situation too.
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That's a real stretch. Answer the phone because your life depends on it? Really? What kind of scenario would require you to answer the phone, or you die?
Waiting for a transplant organ. They will absolutely give it to someone else if they can't get hold of you.
Just because it's not your situation doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
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If you're waiting for a transplant organ, they *will* leave a message if you don't pick up the phone when it rings. And you'll probably have your transplant doctor's contact info.
You don't have actual information that transplant candidates could receive a phone call from an unknown number, you're just guessing.
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If you're waiting for a transplant organ, they *will* leave a message if you don't pick up the phone when it rings. And you'll probably have your transplant doctor's contact info.
They will try every avenue to contact you, but they will not wait long. They have an organ that is rapidly dying that could save a life. If it can't be yours, they will move on quite quickly to someone else.
You don't have actual information that transplant candidates could receive a phone call from an unknown number, you're just guessing.
No, I'm not.
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Sometimes you have to answer the phone to strange calls,
Three words: "Google call screening".
or if you are unfortunate enough to have a iphone ( I replaced mine because it was impossible to spam-filter SMS properly ) , you have voicemail to text services.
Not if you have a kid (or a family) (Score:2)
If you have a kid under 18, unknown caller from local area code could be an emergency from their school, daycare, or a random person.
Now what I have taken to is just immediately hanging up on unknowns the first time they call. If it is a legitimate real human, I hope they will think it was a phone glitch and call back right away.
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If the call is actually important, they will leave a voicemail.
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Then a better advice. Don't pick the phone for anyone. Don't use such an insecure system.
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Wake up!
Organized Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
"Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply migrate. This has resulted in a situation in which the region has essentially become an interconnected ecosystem, driven by sophisticated syndicates freely exploiting vulnerabilities, jeopardizing state sovereignty, and distorting and corrupting policy-making processes and other government systems and institutions."
They have discovered modern organized crime. It all works like this -not just phone scams.
How to respond (Score:2)
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I don't get the texts anymore for some reason; I think my number is on a "do not call" list used by these outfits. Before that, I got a lot of photos from "Chinese women". At one point, a "Japanese woman" and I fell in love at first text. I typically immediately require that they call me "sir" to test the response, and then engage in depth. They either don't get the jokes or don't care or I don't know how to explain it, but they persist, potential
Re:How to respond (Score:4, Informative)
I was once contacted randomly by a hot looking girl on Whattsapp, she introduced herself as a new overseas student (Asian) and apologized for her broken English, but she needed directions to a department at the local university. So far so good, I told her to contact reception.
She thanked me and immediately said I was hot (I don't have pictures of myself) and do I want to go for a drink? So I say no to a few more propositions until she starts asking literally the same uni question again.
I tell her she's _literally_ already asked this, and there's an immediate response: "Oh sorry mate, my mistake". Then it's quiet for an hour and back to "you so hot, what your name?" I stopped responding, and "her" Whattsapp picture vanished from the account.
That scammer must have been bored out of his mind recycling the same pickup line over and over again.
Re: How to respond (Score:2)
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Vote better. This is a solved problem. But it requires political will to implement the solution.
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Respond? Then, they know your contact is valid and sell/give to other spammers. :(
Re: How to respond (Score:2)
It should cost $0.05 to complete a phone call (Score:5, Insightful)
Free phone calls are a scourge on civilization and civilized behavior. It should cost $0.05 complete a call to a USA phone number. The cost would put the scammers out of business immediately.
$0.05 per call would be no real burden on any legitimate use. (And no, I'm not sympathetic to the "legitimate" political callers, surveys, "legitimate" sales, or "charities.")
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Agreed! And use that nickle to fund hunting scammers. Maybe require all consumer phone accounts to get say 10 free calls a month.
Re:It should cost $0.05 to complete a phone call (Score:4, Insightful)
The proven (elsewhere) solution is actually really simple: Make telco providers responsible for filtereing these sources fast and impose nasty fines if they do not. That does collide with political and corporate greed in the US though and hence will not happen anytime soon.
Know how many scam call or unsolicited commercial calls I got in the last 20 years? Two. One was domestic and the call-center got raided and everybody arrested a few days later.
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The problem with that is that, by this point, voice calls from anywhere to anywhere should pretty much be free on top of a basic connection fee. Keeping fees just to make it difficult for scammers is just a financial gift to telecoms. However, there is something to that.. Maybe the way to handle it would be to having a small "unsolicited connection" fee for contacting people that goes not to the telecom, but to the person being contacted. It could be free for anyone already whitelisted (and identified using
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Well then (Score:3)
Treat it like an epidemic and burn everything to the ground when discovered including those running the scams.
Re:Trump should take on scam callers (Score:5, Funny)
you know, this is kinda sweetly innocent, like a child who thinks superman is real
Re: Trump should take on scam callers (Score:2)
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ikr
How do they expand so much? (Score:2)
Don't they need more and more victims to do that?
You would think there would be less and less people willing to do *anything* someone tells them to do over the internet or phone, especially that they don't know.
That and there are all those "this is a scam!" PSAs from all kinds of people in every media.
Where are they getting there increase in victims?
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Re:How do they expand so much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thre is a sucker born every minute...
This is, unfortunately, the literal root of the problem. That and a political class that is corrupt and unwilling to address the problem and voters that have no clue what is actually possible once you eleminate that corruption. Instead, in the US, they vote more corruprtion...
AI will save the day! (Score:2)
Soon there will be no need for these call centers. LLMs, quality TTS, and image generators can take care of every part of the scam, saving these poor wretches from slavery in scam call centers.
How how many of these calls I get? (Score:2)
Two in 20 years. Last one about 10 years ago. Telcos here are obliged to filter the srouces of these. Failure to filter results in quite unpleasant fines. Do I pay more for telecomunication services than I would in the US? No.
This is a problem of greed and politics.
Country codes should still be a thing. (Score:3)
If this makes call support centers move back to the home country that would be just icing on the cake.
Sure poke holes in this idea, but the current situation is a failure.
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Disallow number spoofing even for corporations.
Found the one who does not know how dialing works, and thinks he knows the magic bullet.
A phone number does not correspond to a station. It never has, and it never will. A phone number is a route, which allows the phone switches to forward the call to a destination, which can take the call. That destination is but a trunk. What happens behind the trunk is up to the one operating the end of the trunk. Routes don't have to be symmetric. Just because the Network Provided Number you get gives you the number o