{"id":441,"date":"2018-01-16T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T12:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eset-blog.aist.fun\/scammers-and-jobhunters\/"},"modified":"2019-05-29T11:54:17","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T11:54:17","slug":"scammers-and-jobhunters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.eset.ee\/et\/en\/2018\/01\/16\/scammers-and-jobhunters\/","title":{"rendered":"Scammers and jobhunters"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Guardian, Snighda Poonam recently explored the competition for jobs in general in India, with massive numbers of applicants chasing relatively small numbers of job opportunities. The article on The scammers gaming India\u2019s overcrowded job market <\/a>goes some way to explaining why so many find it hard to resist a career in call-centre scamming.<\/p>\n

Tech support scamming isn\u2019t the only dubious call-centre activity, of course, though it\u2019s one that we\u2019ve often talked about on this blog. Poonam observes that:<\/p>\n

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\u2018F<\/em>or thousands who end up at scam call centres in cities across India, impersonating tax officers, loan agents, Apple executives or cut-rate Viagra manufacturers, the job provides the thrill of cracking the code of American emotions.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s notable that some of the scammers quoted in the article are eager to \u2018blame the victims\u2019, whether it\u2019s for their presumed arrogance or their gullibility. Perhaps it\u2019s just as well for their own psychological wellbeing that they get some sort of thrill, since some employers and recruiters aren\u2019t necessarily more honest with aspiring call-centre operators<\/em> than the operators themselves<\/em> are with their victims. Some agencies are flagrantly charging jobseekers for registering their profiles on web sites in the hope of getting jobs that never turned up, while other jobs promoted as being with major companies turned out to be something quite different.<\/p>\n

After all these years, I still get furious at the heartless exploitation that we associate with these scams. But I\u2019ve often wondered how aware some of the scammers are that what they\u2019re doing is<\/em> scamming as they plough through the script in front of them. Back in the days when I could actually be bothered to engage with cold-call scammers, in some cases it was obvious that they knew little more than their victims, and probably didn\u2019t even have enough knowledge to realize that those scripts were gobbledegook, albeit deliberately deceptive gobbledegook. Other cases indicate much more awareness. My former colleague Craig Johnston *talked to one such cold-caller:<\/p>\n

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\u2018The caller was more than happy to answer my questions about the group\u2019s modus operandi and admitted that his job was to cause confusion and fear in the victim, while posing as a trusted advisor, so that he could sell the victim a product.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the paper from which that quote has been taken, we also noted that:<\/p>\n

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\u2018Others have been more inclined to bluster and threaten, even when (or possibly particularly when) their lack of understanding has been highlighted during interrogation by a less patient recipient of their attentions\u2026we note a number of recent reports where the scammer threatens to deprive the victim of the Windows Update service or even their network connectivity: hopefully, a sign of frustration that the con is getting harder to work.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But it is, I suppose, a good thing to recall that the scammers to whom victims in the US and Europe are talking may themselves be victims of employers wedded to a corrupt business model. That model is facilitated by an economy characterized by huge disparities between numbers of jobseekers and numbers of available jobs. It\u2019s easier to have scruples about how you earn your living when you\u2019re not one of millions of people chasing just a few thousand jobs. And for every sociopath making megabucks out of not caring what damage is done to others, there are many more people who probably wouldn\u2019t be participating in criminal activities** if their own circumstances were more comfortable.<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t protect ourselves and each other from those activities by learning how they operate so as to avoid falling into their traps.<\/p>\n

I make no apology for repeating the advice Josep Albors and myself gave in a blog from 2017: Spanish Harmada: More on tech support scams<\/a><\/p>\n