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717 points ortusdux | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.422s | source
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cedws ◴[] No.42139163[source]
Very nice to see, my grandmother was recently scammed out of a large amount of money. Luckily the bank reimbursed her.

Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for Nigeria.

replies(3): >>42139791 #>>42142216 #>>42143400 #
1. kmeisthax ◴[] No.42143400[source]
Oh, believe me, Indians fucking hate the scammers, probably more than you do.

Jim Browning (the scambaiter who worked with O2 in this article) has successfully compromised several scam operations, gotten their physical address and other dox, and referred them to the police. The offices get raided, Jim gets some nice CCTV footage of the raid, the operators of the criminal enterprise get a nice perp walk... and then a month later the case is mysteriously dismissed with a bullshit reason about AI deepfakes and "IO" (influence operations, I presume).

The thing to keep in mind is that India's government is run by Modi, a Hindu ultranationalist who wants to deport all the country's Muslims to Pakistan[0]. There's a pretty straightforward pipeline from organized crime to fascism and I wouldn't be surprised if the scammers in question here are part of Modi's power base (or part of other organizations which are part of his power base).

The only thing I could think of to fix this would be to strategically suck people out of India through generous visas for migrants who want to live in a country with functioning[1] institutions. The thing about organized crime is that it relies on having a pool of suckers to continue joining the criminal enterprise - in other words, even the scammers are themselves being scammed. This is one of the less selfish reasons why I'm an open borders fanatic, but I also have to admit that such a policy in today's era has negative political capital.

[0] Which itself has money problems because it's budget gets siphoned off by their own military and they have to beg the IMF for scraps

[1] To be clear, India's institutions still exist, they're just mildly broken.