Skype + Telephone Scams: A Love Story
Ashley‘s lately been getting a huge number of calls from someone who appears to be running a “government grant” scam, phoning her cell phone constantly and asking for different person each time. It appears that the attacker is trying to phish for her real address and real name. It’s been so infuriating. Today, the attacker was so brazen as to claim that he was from the US Government, despite the thickest of Mexican or Indian accents. Unbelievable.
Of course, Ashley is going to report this to the police as well as the FTC.
This got me thinking: who’s to say this person or persons is located in the US? One of the inevitable side effects of the plummeting costs of international long distance is that it enables phone to be subject to the same problems as email: the cost of an attack is minimal, and hence the return on investment for any scam or telemarketing campaign is enormous. Mix VOIP, SkypeOut to the mix, along with absurdly inexpensive labor in the international labor market it places with decent Internet connectivity (like India), and you’ve got a telemarketing machine that’s extremely cheap. And mobile. And outside the borders of the victim’s legislative protections.
Now I’m not certain that’s what’s happening in this case, but I have to wonder: why not? Has anyone heard of telemarkers or phone scam artists operating internationally using Skype?
Imagine the possibilities when you mix-in distributed outsourcing such as Mechanical Turk, and its eventual competitors.
Not only do you no longer need to make the calls, you no longer need to know the people making the calls.
Just post a HIT with a phone number, a script, and a set of information to collect.
If you post similar HITs with the same phone number, different questions, and staggered times (say once or twice a month), you could build a very substantial database of information without raising too much suspicion.
For bonus points, each subsequent HIT could build on the last. i.e. If the target knows you have X information, it (potentially) increases the amount of trust they have in you, increasing the chances that they will give you Y information.
From this point, its just a question of developing the cost model. How much is the information worth? How many HITs to acquire/refine the information? How much to offer for each HIT to attract sufficient interest?
Ain’t technology wonderful 😉
Just an observation, I live in the UK and am on the marketers “do not call” list (via http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/ ) yet still get plauged with annoying telephone marketing calls which seem to originate in the USA. Seems Skype would just cheapen existing, pondscum marketing methods. I also get “you have already won” snail mail junk, which originates mainly in Canada.
The UK’s Direct Marketing Association recently launched a campaign to regain the public’s trust (like they ever had any!) See http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/dispnewsstand?article=4197
It’s my personal view that advertising ‘noise’ has increased to intolerable levels in recent years. It invades our life constantly – magazines, flyers, posters, radio, tv, email, websites, IM, telephone calls, cinema, dvds… Marketing – the cancer of media in the 21st century.