PSA: Spam Calls, Porch Pirates, and Retribution

Pointer

Helluva Engineer
Messages
1,801
I've recently been getting absolutely hammered with spam calls. It was so bad, that i ported my phone number to google voice because they have a somewhat decent spam filter.

As a result of all my attempts to get some revenge, I recently came across this video on YouTube. Apparently this scam industry is a $20 Billion a year venture!!

Highlights from the video in case you don't want to watch the whole thing:
  1. $20 Billion a year.
  2. They make hundreds of millions of calls per day
  3. Success rate is about 500 successful calls per day
  4. They have mules who work in the US to receive packages with money at temporary addresses such as hotels/airbnb's
  5. Mules give packages to supervisors
  6. Supervisors wire money to scam companies in other countries (mostly India)
Now this guy (I believe former NASA engineer) has lots of entertaining videos, but this by far is the best and most satisfying. He uses his glitter bomb fake package that was originally designed to catch porch pirates to get info on the mules, which ultimately leads to the supervisors.

Summary and gist of the video is that the best way to combat this is to spread awareness to the most vulnerable (usually elderly people who are much more trusting, aka your elderly parents/grandparents). The hope is that the less people fall for these scams, the less incentive there will be for these scammers to pop up again and ultimately drive down this horrendous industry.



I hope you all can spread the word and we can do some good here.
 
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