WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 46356521

(no title)

wtmt | 2 months ago

Sorry to hear this. From where I am (India), there’s hardly anything that you can do because it’s likely that the ones with power won’t do anything. As an individual, you can only focus on yourself and those you know and try to educate them as much as is possible.

These kind of scams have become a huge problem in India (look up “digital arrest” scams). People of all backgrounds and age groups have lost a lot of money (to put it in US dollar equivalent amounts, imagine a person losing few hundred thousand dollars to a couple of million dollars). There is nothing like “digital arrest” in Indian laws. The government has tried to warn people about this.

The larger problem seems to be a combination of factors across disinterested entities:

1. The police aren’t interested in solving these (there’s a separate division for cybercrime). Filing a formal report is usually thwarted and avoided by the police. Even if they show some interest, it always involves paying them fat sums of money. There’s no guarantee that they can recover the money.

2. The banks aren’t interested in solving this. It seems like specific bank branch managers are involved and just stand by allowing large transactions (like cash withdrawals) to just be approved without raising any questions or concerns. All the talk by banks about “risk management” (alongside compliance matters) goes out the window just for the victims of these scams.

3. With SMS OTPs being common and the scammers recruiting some locals to run SIM farms/phone farms, the telecom companies aren’t interested in solving issues within themselves either. Though there is a limit of nine phone numbers (total) per person in India, and though there is on paper a KYC process (including a live video) to get a phone number, the telecom companies have systems and employees who can provide numerous numbers based on stolen or fake IDs.

4. The government is a bystander and appears helpless. Instead of creating laws and enforcing existing laws, it focuses on some awareness that these scams are not genuine.

5. The Supreme Court finally ordered CBI (the Indian equivalent of FBI) to investigate these scams.

So there you have it: none of the entities involved has any interest or will to do something about the problem. There will always be excuses that the scammers are in another country.

discuss

order