I will occasionally find myself on the phone with someone in India for one of two reasons: One of them is legal, the other isn’t, and they both suck.
The illegal reason:
As I’m sure lots of people know, there’s a rash of scam call centers operating out of India. They seem to have the same basic premise: they either cold-call you or send you an email that you’ve been billed for some service like Norton or McAfee (arguably even the real version of these is a scam, that’s a different blog post), and you suddenly call them back because you want a refund.
Through a series of bad technical decisions, they connect to your computer and have you type something into a DOS window (a fake “refund server”), and then convince you that they’ve given you a refund, but way too much, and at this point the critical thinking point of your brain has been shut off, because they convince you to go buy Best Buy gift cards, or send a Western Union transfer, or literally put hundred dollar bills into a book and mail it somewhere. I’m not kidding. People fall for this. Daily.
These people prey on the elderly and the clueless. They prey on guilt. They prey on compassion.
And there’s an industry here in the US of people who prank and scam them back. Why? Because it’s pretty much impossible to pursue them legally, so instead YouTubers like Scammer Payback, Kitboga, and Jim Browning engage them to both waste their time to frustrate them, and also increase awareness of this problem. (After all, if they’re on the phone with the YouTubers, then they’re not on the phone with some actual senior citizen).
Sometimes, instead, these scammers just call you claiming to be from the Social Security or Medicaid or Student Loan Refund department, and they’re calling to mine your personal info, including your social and the like.
Either way, these groups take advantage of the fact that it’s easy to get US-based numbers with little traceability or consequence. It’s trivial make calls to the us which spoof numbers in your own area code and prefix. And these people either are moving too fast for the local authorities to act…or they’re paying them off.
At some high level, the Indian authorities know this is a problem. But at a low level, well…bribe money talks. It’s just how the industry works. I have a server that I shipped to Dubai that will probably be forever stuck in Indian Customs, because I can’t figure out how to expense bribing a customs official.
If I can think of one possible solution for this, it’s this: If you have an elderly parent or grandparent, don’t get them a computer, get them an iPad with a keyboard. There’s no remote desktop server for it, but they can still do all the family zoom meetings and the like, still get on to their bank account, still use a browser, and the accessability settings might just be better than Windows.
As for me, every time I speak to one of these folks on the phone, I offer to pay them $50 personally, via the crypto of their choice, to turn over to the good guys. So far, no takers.
The Legal Reason
I said there were two reasons, and one was legal. Amoral, but legal.
The other reason I might find myself on the phone with India is because a US-presenced company is going on the cheap and not putting jobs in this country, even through I paid for my product at US market rates in US market dollars, and even though we absolutely *could* have those jobs here (and often, the tier 2 and above support IS here).
You may have seen a previous blog post of mine where the tech kept starting their emails with GREETINGS OF THE DAY!
This would be that situation. Indian Tech Support.
Sometimes they’ll lie about their name. Sometimes they’ll lie about their location. And they’ll never give you a phone number that starts with +01140. They’re often packed this tight:
They are one step above ChatGPT. In fact, they might get replaced by it soon — both the AI industry, and the industry paying them would love to do this. Unfortunately, while we’ve gotten good at making robots sound good in text, they haven’t managed to sound convincing on the phone — yet.
Also, sometimes those call centers and email centers themselves are outsourced. Not just to another country, but to another company. That person you’re talking to doesn’t work for Dell, they work for a contractor that just runs call centers and hires people on a revolving door. And they’re the lowest bidder. Handling your data.
The level of clue from Indian Tier One tech support is not great. You can write up a detailed description of your problem along with probable causes and what you’ve tried, and your first email back will be:
Greetings of the day! I understand you’re having [vague problem marginally
connected to yours]. I am [name] and I will be here to help you. I would
like you to please try these troubleshooting steps [which won't help
at all]...That response comes fast so they can say they responded inside the required time.
They simply have a script, and they follow it. And when you’re asked to rate the support you’ve received, you lie and give them an okay score because you feel guilty, and these people stay employed. If you give them a bad score, they don’t get let go, they just get moved to a different client. Okay, you didn’t rate high enough to do Dell, okay, let’s move you over to…AcmeComputers.
Worse still, it comes with a glass ceiling for the people on the phones. At no point will the agent show enough clue that Dell or VMWare or The Datacenter Company will sponsor an H1B visa and move them here. They may make what you consider a reasonable salary in their home country, but there’s an upper limit on what they’re worth. And it’s still way less than the US federal minimum wage. Effectively, as soon as they demand above 7.25, they’re worthless to those US companies.
There’s a technology problem here, too: Often a phone call with these folks is on a heavily-delayed, echoey, noisy phone line with a lot of other people in the background — because they went cheap on the actual phone circuits as well. They went cheap on the handsets (heck, usually there IS no handset). They went cheap on the headset — possibly just a little toy thing that plugs into your headphone and mic jack, versus a quality Plantronics or something. Because it’s not worth paying for the good stuff for Tier 1. They could give people better headsets, or better cubicles, or invest in software with better noice cancellation. It’s the lowest bidder, all around.
Those people aren’t worth it good equipment, and yet, somehow, neither are we. This is considered an acceptable class of service.
There are some companies that I’ve just stopped trying to get on the phone. Email or ticket system only. And if they try calling me, my own bastard-operator-from-hell antisocial solution here is to tell people I have auditory issues (it’s not a lie). The echo on the line plus the additional noise means that very often, the agent and I constantly wind up talking over each other. I find it frustrating to the point that I lose scope of the actual problem and focus on that. So “Sorry, I’m partially deaf, please stick to email kthxbye” is the way things get solved.
My own solution may also include reminding people in these call centers that they can rise up and seize the means of production, that as humans, they’re worth more than they’re being paid. But that would just be evil.
The icing on the cake is that because of this evil capitalist behavior (which itself has become a meme), we’ve caused people here in the US to not second-guess being on a call when it’s a scammer. It’s served to make the scams seem more legit. And that sucks.
