Jim Browning
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2023
16:18 · 20M views · Mar 2, 2020
Jim Browning reverses a scammer's remote connection and discovers CCTV in a Delhi call centre. He gives a detailed look at how a tech support scam operation runs, and he shared the footage with the BBC.
HN points to it as a fascinating inside look at how Indian scam call centres operate, often when scams come up in discussion.
5 comments from Hacker News
Yes. Many scam operations are full-fledged "companies" which operate out of commercial office space and have a payroll of employees who show up to work every day Monday to Friday and scam people as if it was a normal job. This is a fascinating YouTube series from a guy who managed to hack into the IT system of an Indian scam operation (including gaining live access to their security camera footage!) It goes into a lot of detail about how this particular outfit operates: this video
Obligatory kitboga mention: [LINK] . The dude is a genius at baiting scammers and his stream is family-friendly as far as I know. Then there is Jim Browning on YouTube.... I’ll just leave this here: this video
I've been to Mexico so many times all over the country and they have cheaper access to mobile networks than any western country I've been to. That alone makes it a terrible example for western developed countries which was always the context of my comment. Not to mention I'd love to see the penetration and market ROI numbers for what you claim is a legitimate service offering we should be worried about in Mexico alone. The idea that moving from <1mbps-10mbps to basically decent quality fiber speeds on your phone will result in reduced access to networks (via finely controlled interception and inspection) sounds stupid to me. And as I said it only makes sense in the developing world where there are actually customers who would buy such a thing, and even then only a tiny niche. But in the western world, to expect the entire market to be so anti-consumer and roll backwards like that, that still sounds like a fantasy to me. I'm not dumb enough to say that giant oligopolies won't try but I highly doubt it will go beyond speculation let alone ever become anything close to 0.1% of the marketshare within the country, let alone globally. It's not a serious threat that can't be dealt with by existing means, even those that roll out well before it ruins anything real. Meanwhile Indian scammers, who for a significant number we already have the addresses and names of and who use American phone services (as shown in the sublinked video) make hundreds of millions off westerners and literall
It's hard to differentiate Plaids behaviour in getting user account details from those used by Amazon Refund Scams [1]. Their motive may be different but their actions just help make this sort of behaviour on the vulnerable (ie. non technically/security literate) easier to repeat by the more unscrupulous. [1] this video
Probably much the same for phone spam which is why all of us get (semi-targeted) calls from indian call centers daily. Plenty of these are spawn out of Discord/Telegram networks to coordinate infrastructure. Via the grey/blackhat versions of Twilio. It's far too common for the operators to give a shit. See: this video