One of my friends is working over at Yahoo! and their product just launched: Yahoo! Answers – “a free service where people can ask questions and get answers from real people on any topic”
See the press release for more details.
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?