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Life

Beware of India Call Centre Scams

I just watched a video on India call centre scams (you can read the written version here) and it really gives me the goosebumps.

These tech support scams mainly These old people live alone and they are not tech-saavy, so when they encounter technical issues, they call tech support for help.

Quoting the video,

India has become a leader in the international tech support scamming industry, taking more than more than US$1 billion a year from the United States alone.

There are also people like Leo (not his real name) who has levelled up into and “entrepreneur” or a scam call center consultant who sets up scamming outfits for those with money to invest. From hiring to hardware, he has it down to a science, especially on how long it will take to generate returns for the investors.

The worst is, even when people like investigative journalist Samarth Bansal and Snigdha Poonam uncovers the truth about these India call centre scams, the Indian police does nothing! There are no laws or legislations to govern online transactions that originate in another country.

Some scambaiters such as ‘Sven’ decided to take things into their own hands. Through reverse tracking, he has managed to get into the company’s systems, securing access to their confidential files and real-time CCTV footage of scams taking place. And yet when ‘Sven’ reports the scam centre with detailed evidence to the police, the Indian police sends him off saying it’s not under their jurisdiction.

I am not a scambaiter and I don’t exactly know how these scams work but one lesson I have learned from love scams is:

If someone you just met asks for money from you, there is a high chance it’s a scam.

Categories
Life

Scam Alert! Scammers on Facebook/Tinder/Meetup

Scam Alert

Do I have the words “ Please Scam Me” written across my forehead or something?

Because if that is not the reason, I can’t understand why I am ALWAYS meeting scammers. I have met so many scammers that it is statically impossible.

Let me just share a few of my experiences with you all here. These are the recent ones which I can still remember.

Case 1: New York Engineer Patrick Chong 

He found me on Meetup.com and we continued chatting on WhatsApp. He was here in Singapore for contract negotiations, apparently.
He was born in Hong Kong but he and his parents migrated to the US long time ago.
His profile picture on Meetup.com and WhatsApp looked pretty ordinary, very Chinese-looking. He also sent me some recent photographs so I thought he might be real. But for someone who lives in New York and is an engineer by profession, his English sucks (red flag).
We have been chatting for almost a month now. He didn’t come on too strongly. I was busy last week so we didn’t really talk. I suddenly received a message from him this morning asking me to reply when I see the message. He then told me something about his project having problem and he asked me to pay for him first and he will reimburse me. I immediately blocked him. 

Case 2: Real Estate Agent from China

I was talking with my girlfriend the other day and she was telling me about how her friend found her husband on Tinder. It gave me hope that there are good real people looking for relationship on Tinder. I downloaded it again and even put in recent photographs.

This guy from China matched with me. Apparently he was in Singapore for holiday. How convenient.
He was all “call me hubby” and I played along. We have great chemistry and we were texting non-stop. Somehow the topic changed to making money. He was telling me that he invests in bitcoin and he asked me to join him. He gave me a link to a bitcoin platform call EasyCoin but Apple blocked it because the certificate is not verified. I told him about it and he told me how to go about it. But this made me doubt the credibility of this bitcoin platform so I did a search online. It turned out that people have been talking about this EasyCoin scam since 2013! I told him that I have too many things on hand and I put bitcoin on hold for a while. He agreed and didn’t push further.
The next day, when we started texting in the afternoon, he was talking about the bitcoin platform again. He asked me to join him and promised to teach me. I told him that I am not interested and this time he was all “if you love me, shouldn’t you learn to enjoy what I love”. I asked him about the EasyCoin scam and he said that’s because they don’t know how to play. He says he earns tens of thousands of dollars, he won’t want to cheat me of my palsy few hundred dollars.
I got tired of all these pretense and blocked him.

These are just two examples. There are many others on Tinder, Facebook and other platforms.

My conclusion is no more internet dating, I am only going to join programs organized by SDN-accredited dating agencies from now on.