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Indian authorities raid fake tech support rings after tipoff from Amazon and Microsoft
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Yeah, it's weird though why specifically in India these call centres pop up and not anywhere else?
Can't it have anything to do with Western companies outsourcing there en masse to fuck over Western workers, thus making it plausible that someone with a thick Indian accent is calling you on behalf of them?
Or the fact that Indian wages are kept artificially low, with abysmal workers rights, as is common with the countries doing the lion's share of the world's manufacturing, so it makes sense for people to live off of the literal scraps of Westerners?
I think the real disgusting thing is that the relatively small amounts of money that you can scam out of westerners is able to sustain a whole industry in India. If these guys got proper jobs with proper pay, they wouldn't need to do this to get ahead.
The main reason it's India in particular (instead of any number of other low-wage countries) is that Indians speak English.
One thing is that the scam call centers usually pay very well there. From what I've heard, even teens can get in on it, and they can make as much as someone with a full college degree just working for a scam company. The owners are making six figure sums each year.
And the amounts aren't always small. Sometimes they'll find a particularly vulnerable elderly person and net thousands, or even tens of thousands.
I think there are a lot of factors. India being poor, corrupt and nationalistic are probably the main ones tho imo.
Low regulation and not tech savvy police or law makers. And focus is on other more pressing violent crimes. Politicians using police to do their bidding. All leads to some people doing whatever the hell they want and scamming old ladies in western countries. Those people are a problem to locals as well. They will scam anything from anyone.
Also, India is used heavily for actual tech support and call-centers. Many of these places hide amongst them, sometimes in the same buildings as a legit operation which helps mask them.
I'd imagine that a bunch of the people staffing the scam centers are defectors from a legit one, and take their knowledge - and probably customer lists - with them
India has the largest population of English speaking folks anywhere in the developing world, I assume. That combined with the fact that it already has a base of IT workers trained in this sector. (after all, outsourcing some kind of jobs to India has become the norm, not the exception).
Also, this is hardly a political issue. As a developing country, India rightly has many more pressing issues to deal with and people here often tend to skew towards that. This tends to put these scamsters on the back burner and seldom, action takes place. I, myself, was almost taken in by such a scam where they almost beguiled me into sideloading a malicious apk. Despite this, I cannot do much since proving cybercrime is much tougher here(especially when someone just attempted it, but was not completely successful).