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"I think I've lived long enough to see competitive Counter-Strike as we know it, kill itself." Summary of Richard Lewis' stream (Long)
I want to preface that the contents of this post is for informational purposes. I do not condone or approve of any harassments or witch-hunting or the attacking of anybody. Richard Lewis recently did a stream talking about the terrible state of CS esports and I thought it was an important stream anyone who cares about the CS community should listen to.
Vod Link here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/830415547 I realize it is 3 hours long so I took it upon myself to create a list of interesting points from the stream so you don't have to listen to the whole thing, although I still encourage you to do so if you can.
I know this post is still long but probably easier to digest, especially in parts.
Here is a link to my raw notes if you for some reason want to read through this which includes some omitted stuff. It's in chronological order of things said in the stream and has some time stamps.
https://pastebin.com/6QWTLr8T Intro
- "The last month has convinced me, that we are going to be heading into a dark place for Counter-Strike esports in 2021."
- "I think I've seen the scene essentially kill itself."
- "For the past 5 to 6 years, we've basically been in a holding pattern of people coming into our game wanting to run it, wanting to run all of the esports and wanting to profiteer and its been sort of a concerted effort to drive them off and push them away."
- "We're spread way too thin."
- "If Riot don't get involved and stop the scumbags that have moved over to Valorant from getting their feet under the table, Valorant is going to have real problems."
- RL thinks too much has happened all at once for us to do anything except watch it play out, like:
- Recent CSPPA strike against BLAST
- ESIC failures and them not being supported enough
- Teams cheating i.e. coaches/bugs
- Widespread match fixing
- The Pandemic
- "People who try to hold bubble events are so incompetent and fuck up and people get the 'rona and its their fault."
- "People who say Flashpoint is a bubble is full of shit and is a lie and people are now suffering for that lie."
- "To save money they let people go home and break the bubble for a week."
- "Not just Flashpoint peoples decision, they have a partner that handles the production." (hinting FACEIT)
- "People are trapped in hotels essentially under house arrest because of COVID restrictions and has fucked peoples lives up."
- "It's all too much, all of this incompetence, all of this greed, maybe we ride it out."
- RL says he has talked to the Riot devs (the ones working on Valorant) and says, "They are so cognizant of all the fuck ups and all the problems we have in Counter-Strike."
- He continues to say that this is factored into their business plan and that we never had a competitor, but just so happens to have one coincide, when we are at our worst.
CSPPA - Counter-Strike Professional Players' Association
"Who does this union really fucking serve?"
- RL believes that the CSPPA is a mockery.
- He points out the hypocrisy that they wouldn't strike for the pros who were kicked out of ESL Pro League, or for Jamppi or dream3r.
- He also says ESL paid CSPPA and are racketeering and many other TOs have to pay them to get their "seal of approval"
- He says they would strong-arm TOs saying "well if you don't give us the money, these guys are so we'll just have to commit to playing their event."
- Also points out that they will strike against a competitor they are not in agreement with (Flashpoint)
- RL: "It's what it says about every other time you haven't done it and it's about every time you don't do it now moving forward." "The issues they've chosen to ignore this year alone are embarrassing."
- Then he points out that there was no strike for Valve qualifiers even if we have no major but Jamppi and dream3r can't play in them.
- "and Valve have said 'Oh yeah we know actually their stories are accurate, Jamppi didn't cheat, now in a legally binding document. Yep dream3r did have his account hacked in a LAN café', but they still can't play. Where is the fucking solidarity? Gone. Doesn't exist. It's not important [because] it doesn't affect you." "That's what the union does right now, it looks after all the tier 1 people."
- He says the CSPPA doesn't represent all players all the time and has driven a divide where you have the haves and have-nots
- "We have a tier of players that operate with impunity and do not help their tier 2 or tier 3 players out at all." "If you are not a tier 1 player you do not matter, they don't event ask your opinion."
- He tells chrisJ to admit and own the fact that the reason he didn't speak up during the ESL Pro League debacle is because it didn't affect him
- "They are looking after some players at the expense of other players. How the fuck is that a union?"
- He says the BLAST situation is a reasonable dispute and supports the players but is not the right time for a strike and have not even identified the correct enemy
- He thinks players are lashing out now due to previous incidents and are upset that BLAST are working with ESIC
- He stated that CSPPA shouldn't beefing with ESIC and they should be working in harmony
- He says what they need to do is talk with the teams/organizations that have sold that right to BLAST
- RL: "Your employers, the people who pay you that massive exorbitant salaries, when you don't stream and you don't do interviews and you offer no value beyond your ability to click heads and you get 25k dollars a month." "Why don't you talk to them about it? Oh right. You're happy to take away BLAST's paper, but you don't want to risk your own."
- "I am seeing such unbelievable cowardice from the players here with the battles you choose."
- "Where was the strike action when in the qualifiers for the world championship, there were teams and players engaged in huge conflicts of interest?" "Where was the strike action when your image rights were taken and sold to every league you've ever been in every union type organization you've ever been associated with like, WESA, to your org every time you sign a contract, to the leagues you play in."
- "Your image rights are essentially worthless now, there's about 10 fucking separate parties that have them, and how many of them are giving you anything for it? Not much pretty much your org by the way."
- "That's a big issue. Your image is you, your image is your brand. What are you doing about that? Nothing."
- He is also angry at SirScoots who is "popping off" at people on Twitter who all want the same thing, which is 'A unified Counter-Strike scene for everybody, that works for everybody, that has a sustained ecosystem that nourishes everybody.' "We don't have that now."
- He also says their rankings are a joke
- "Just so happened, oh look TACO, that very important prominent member of the board, we pushed his team artificially up when they weren't even in the fucking top 20, not by a long shot."
- He also says the ineptitude of the CSPPA cost Flashpoint a monitor sponsor
- "Is it really a player association or is it like a fucking agency at this point"
ESIC - Esports Integrity Commission
"They have been put in an impossible position."
- RL says that Ian Smith, the founder of ESIC and who was done work in mainstream sports, is a good and honorable man who has dedicated his life to integrity and sports. He takes on both sides, ensuring match fixers are punished, but also doing appeals and ensuring those punishments were fair.
- "ESIC is a tiny organization" and are in need of money, "They didn't run a grift like the CSPPA did."
- "Saying 'you want our support and you want the players to turn up you better pay us.' They don't do that."
- "Had startup seed money from MTG and since then they've been pecking shit with the hens."
- Ian Smith made sure that the money given by MTG (Modern Times Group, parent company of ESL, ESEA, DreamHack) was nothing more than startup money and wouldn't be in debt to them
- Ian Smith sat down with other TO's not part of MTG and wanted to partner with them. They declined and called ESIC "ESL spies and we will never align ourselves with you"
- "They only were just able to afford, hiring a PR guy on a full time salary to deal with the press and send out those releases you've seen, this year."
- "They have a tiny group of staff investigating these things and they have taken on the biggest problems in our scene: the cheating, the match fixing."
- ESIC have had "unprecedented levels of cheating to deal with, because there's something wrong with our scene ever since we went online. There's something wrong with it, everyone's lost their fucking pride and self-respect and they got no passion for it anymore, so they think fuck it, what's in it for me?"
- He calls out coaches who are talking about players rights when they would rob and steal from them.
- Also says more coaches being banned are coming
- He also points out flaws in community's reaction to the punishments to coaches bans: "Half of the cunts still have jobs and some of the cunts got new jobs. We didn't even shun the cheating coaches."
- ESIC have "found I think another 2 or 3 exploits like that one and they are investigating them all right now, it's going on right now."
- "I know that there are going to be more names getting banned, again."
- "So they're doing that on a skeleton crew while, investigating 3 continents worth of match fixing in MDL and semi-pro level CS." "They're doing this with half a dozen people." "They don't have any money or any help. People barely even fucking cooperate with them, they are treated like pariahs. It's ridiculous."
- "Why are the CSPPA popping off at ESIC on my Twitter timeline, when you should be working together." "because its all about what's in it in for me." "2020, the online era of CS: 'What is in it for me?' How can I cheat, how can I get my paper, how can I bleed this scene one last time before I fuck off and play shooty shooty bang bang Riot Games babys first fps."
- RL says that in the CIS region, teams have gone to tournaments and have been eliminated multiple times by the same team. We found out they were cheating and those players who lost, have been cut from their roster, careers ended because of cheaters.
Stream Sniping
"They're all at it in the online era, they're all at it, they're all cheating, they're all using exploits, probably that see through smoke bug got used a bunch of times"
- RL talks about how there is no integrity from dead (the player), always denying when caught doing something
- On the topic of 'BLAST never said we couldn't stream snipe': "Lies, BLAST never said you could do that, they had to sort of retcon it." "because what happened after that they fucking started snitching and squealing"
- "Suddenly you had like, 10 of the top 15 teams in the world, staring into the abyss of being banned for 6-12 months in line with ESIC recommendations."
- He says that ESIC was put in a tough situation and couldn't enforce the bans because it would have resulted in killing CS. What resulted was, BLAST, ESIC, and teams came together and gave them a warning and told them, in RL's words "don't do this again or you're gonna get got."
- He then says the top teams brushed this off and didn't give a fuck
- The new MiBR team playing Flashpoint, that wasn't involved in the previous incidents are doing it again (stream sniping). He gave credit to Flashpoint for the quick resolution and punishment and respect for cogu's response to the situation.
- "ESIC came out and said, once more, 'Guys, zero tolerance from now on.'" RL then got upset at community's reaction calling ESIC "pussies" for their non enforcement and said if we want competitive CS we cant ban the top 10 teams.
- He points out how players have no integrity and will do anything for an edge as long as they won't get detected or banned or it's within a grey area.
- "All of this shit was mad avoidable, even in the pandemic era."
- He talks about why aren't we filming them. Why aren't there representatives for leagues and tournaments making sure players aren't cheating?
Match Fixing
"How many years have we let our scene be fucking pillaged by these greedy cunts?" "We just let it happen."
- RL says that gambling and skins betting which existed in moderation was "accelerated and blown up by the Call of Duty greedy fucks."
- "Never forget TmarTn was on the board of EnVyUs." "His website, CSGOLotto, they had a bunch of off-the-books sponsorships." "NBK promoted them. People forget."
- "Those people who had access to the skins, go to the players" "Even people like s1mple, best player in the world, even he scammed knives and skins off fucking fans."
- Owners of skin casino sites would approach pros and lend them skins to use in tournaments and possibly keep them after reaching a deal
- Players would tip off inside info about matches and teams in exchange for skins. Info such as: roster changes, how they played in scrims
- They would use this info to bet and subvert the odds on their sites. "That happened religiously, I can't even tell you how many times it happened."
- "I had access to the biggest database of information, from an inside betting circle in NA, and it would take information and screenshots from other pro players, who were feeding them info in exchange for money or skins."
- "Some of these players are still playing." "Incredibly, there are players still in the CSPPA today, complaining about the BLAST recordings, that were embroiled in this murky shit back then."
- RL also says that there were tournaments where teams contrived with each other, who should throw, who should win.
- "There's a handful of people that are trying to fucking clean it up, and you think you get something over the line and you see something like the CSPPA and it's run by corrupt fucking chuckle heads, and now you've got another corrupt body you have to fight on a fucking daily basis, it's demoralizing."
- "It's too far gone. Our entire semi-professional scene is compromised."
- "It's rife guys, I'm not going to lie any more. It's not just China, it's not just Russia, it's here, it's NA, it's Europe, it's Australia, so much more than you think, so much more than we can prove."
- "I get sent chat logs all the time […] and they're morons, these players, short-sighted, amateur, morons and they're doing it on WhatsApp." People would get cut from the bets because they want to make more money, then they leak the logs. He says, from the chat logs, they spread "little" bets across every site they can (400 to 1k dollars) to prevent shifting odds
- He says the scumbags who've fucked off to Valorant will do the same there if Riot doesn't do something and says Valorant "is an esports scene heading for a very early fall based on the sheer volume of scumbags that are already there."
- "That's tier 2 CS in a nutshell these days. They know they're never going to play in a major, so what's the punishment?"
- "All of these tier 2 fucks that are fixing games now they are like the fucking mafia compared to iBuyPower" "These guys are working with organized criminals to fix entire seasons worth of games. That's what's going on in your tier 2 CS."
- "I'm literally being told that there are players fixing games at all levels of Chinese esports and motherfuckers with guns are turning up to team houses and stuff."
North America
"Everyone in NA has left we've lost a continents worth of support during this pandemic and Valve haven't said a fucking word."
- RL says the Call of Duty "goblins" that destroyed CS for years are the same people who are now trying to leave CS. "The nerve to treat a game where the fans, and the community, and the TO's were nothing but good to you." "To just kick the players out now and go and leave and say 'It just doesn't make financial sense.' Oh you'll slither back when we have a major though for them stickers won't you."
- There's a cascading effect in NA where people don't bother with CS anymore and people like Chaos suffer.
- He says NA team owners are incompetent for always wanting it easy and always wanting a guarantee on their investment without skill or nuance.
- RL says he would be able to market a team correctly and would have a good ROI and also points out how TSM wouldn't even be bothered to tweet that their team, which was one of the best in the world, was playing at the Major.
- He also says not all NA owners are like that, compliments and respects Jason Lake who nearly lost everything to keep Complexity going.
- He then calls out the incompetence in Infinite Esports when they acquired OpTic Gaming and bought an Indian CS team.
- He says HECZ is not to blame here and that they couldn't tell forsaken was cheating when it was so obvious.
- They measured his reaction time to the likes of dev1ce and s1mple
- When an enemy showed up on his screen he won that duel something like 44% of the time
- "was like the number 1 player in the world statistically"
- He brought a laptop to their bootcamp and refused to use the high end PCs that hey provided
- He respects Andy Miller (NRG CEO) and HECZ but says that the attitude of not being able to easily monetize their teams is "piss weak" and there needs to be a risk.
- He says Chaos EC shouldn't be cutting their roster and should be competent enough to be able to figure out how to make money off their team.
- He says there are still opportunities in NA and people are panicking and pulling out, and says Valorant will be the same if not worse.
- He also says "bums" who couldn't even get out of groups in NA competitions, are making crazy money in Valorant and says it will continue to inflate.
- He also said that he heard rumors that EG (Evil Geniuses) are done.
- He also thinks that the rumors of a Valve franchised league from before was sparked up from "these lazy fabled weak NA fucking team owners basically trying to see if Valve would bite at the hook if it was dangled and they didn't"
- Slasher says NA team owners are really in favor of franchised leagues because they want to make more money. "Most of the powerful team owners right now are on board with ditching this third party organization structure, or they are trying to play this power politics with all the TOs, and that is contributing to a lot of the problems there"
- RL says that Riot has proved they can run a franchised league (LCS) and will be profitable in 2021 which is what a lot of team owners care about and says the competition will only serve to snatch people away from CS.
- RL continues to say, "I am so sick and tired of what we have done to this scene, I am just exhausted with it." "I think we have legitimately fucked it, I really think we have. I think we're staring into almost like a CGS (Championship Gaming Series) wasteland in NA." "Counter-Strike esports is a fucking joke."
Talent
"TO's have treated CS talent like absolute human garbage for years now."
- RL says that people like Sean Gares and ddk switching over to Valorant isn't for financial reasons because they are making less over there.
- He points out that TO's can't even give talent a 3 month in advance calendar.
- Because of the pandemic TO's won't hire certain people and some people are working more hours for the same money.
- He says we as a community don't respect journalists enough which is why we don't have good journalists.
- He also says DeKay is leaving the scene soon and that Thorin is close to leaving also
- He says he had to talk a caster down from quitting and was struggling to find reasons.
- He says that DreamHack told Vince they would hire him but not if he wants to stick with dusT and says that this is the norm in esports. "Constant leveraging of people against each other." and says this is why we don't have a talent union.
- New gen casters are getting put into shit situations and the community's reaction to them is adding fuel to the fire
- He says the reason Moses left was because of the terrible conditions
- He says that Anders had to constantly leave his family and kid because someone fucked up or broke promises and had to constantly tell his kid to their face that "daddy can't be home this weekend."
- He says that esports has always been a lie to sell you this dream, "Meanwhile there's about 2% of the cunts getting all the checks."
Valve
"Anything that Riot does, is better than Valve's inaction"
- Slasher says that the larger aspect of esports as a whole compared to other entertainment mediums and Valve's lack of inattention are the bigger problems. He continues saying that the fact that Valve let their game be ran as an esport, they need to take on the responsibilities of it.
- Both Slasher and RL wants Valve to take control but not on the level of Riot Games, there needs to be a balance.
- In case it was ever a question: Gabe Newell has been to 0 CSGO Majors.
- RL calls Valve out saying they could have done something during the gambling era.
- He says Valve used to come to the majors, but doesn't think they do anymore.
- RL had met with Valve at the Cluj-Napoca Major and had tried to appeal iBP's indefinite punishment and had also gave Brax's life story:
- A recent family member passed away, they had lost a lot of income, they had to live in trailer, iBuyPower did not pay any salaries, and was pressured by family to make money who didn't support his career.
- RL said that Valve told him, "How dare you try and make us feel guilty." "We shouldn't feel bad about enforcing the only thing that matters that we need to make players afraid of: cheating and match fixing"
- RL also tried to share other info about match fixing and nothing came of it
- RL points out that Source 2 or a new engine is not something you will want based on the experience of transitioning from CS 1.6 to CS:S. "Valve's track record with brand new engines being launched, not fucking great from what I remember."
- Slasher says "If there is anything the community should do, is pressure Valve to hire a community manager."
- They say that we need a commissioner, a community manager (not the person who runs the Twitter who posts memes all day), then we need to have a circuit
- RL reiterates that Valve doesn't care about CS esports and says they need to change the culture at Valve to make them care about CS esports
- Slasher says a systemic problem is making it so working on CSGO would be a bad decision for you as an employee for Valve
- He also hasn't talked to Valve in ages and have sent over bugs and cheats and doesn't get emails back anymore
- Slasher says we should be directing attention at the developer leads, pointing out Ido Magal, if he even is still the project lead
- RL thinks that Ido and Brian are the only people that "vaguely even give a fuck about CS" and were the only people that RL recalled that actually read Reddit and paid attention from time to time
- "It is really fucking precarious. Somebody has got to step the fuck up and start giving a shit"
- Slasher suggests org owners, with CSPPA, with ESIC, with TOs have a concerted effort against Valve
- "Riot Games are doing better things than Valve in the esports space" which is something RL didn't think he'd say.
- "People who used to be talent, working with unions, arguing with other talent, when the unions fucked them over, can't understand their perspective, TOs fucking over broadcast talent, broadcast talent wanting to leave and go and work for orgs, orgs having no money, Valve might take coaches away because all the coaches are cheating, ESIC has about 4 people in a fucking call doing the investigations, everyone thinks they're spies for ESL, ESL are just the evil fucking overlords wanting to rule the scene and will just somehow, like cockroaches outliving a nuclear bomb, and Valve are in a fucking holiday in Hawaii thinking about the next Dota character because they don't give a fuck about us."
Closing Statements
"We've peaked. If we want to sustain and exist, now is the time to figure it out. No esports lasts as long as this, we've already done 8 years. We've already broke the records. We have got to figure out a way to coexist and drive the negative forces out and we need to do it as a collective and we're not doing that."
- RL compared the Counter-Strike scene to the people on the Titanic who ran around with guns robbing people while the boat was sinking.
- "We have given up on being a respectable esports scene." "We are now a conduit to make money for those who want to just milk it, just have one last ride, one last roll of the dice. It's done." "What a fucking mess. What have we done to our fucking scene?"
- "There's just too much self-interest driving all of this." "I don't see a way we stop the dominoes." "When it's that bad, when there's that many dishonest people that ESIC have to come out and say that if we punish them all there's no one left. What does that tell you?"
- "How many opportunities have we had to clean house? How many times have we said, 'this must never happen again', and another scandal." "The entire skins betting operations was the biggest criminal conspiracy in esports ever executed and no one has been punished for it." "The people who could be driving that don't want to."
- "Right now people are fans of those organizations because the scene has value. It is worth being a fan of Astralis because they are excellent at Counter-Strike. It is worth being a fan of s1mple because he is the best player in Counter-Strike, maybe the exception of ZywOo. If the scene is devalued, if the scene loses its meaning, those things lose its meaning too, and people will leave, people will stop tuning into the games. I have seen it happen in multiple esports, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I am getting big Brood War vibes right now and I don't like it."
- "The role you play in all of this as fans, as viewers, as listeners, as consumers of esports content, it's absolutely imperative that you know who the good guys are. It's absolutely imperative that you use your voice. It's absolutely imperative that when things are bad, you know who, at least, is trying to make them good, and you have to apply your criticism to the right targets."
- He continues saying it's no good in continuing to attack ESIC and saying how they are bad, ESIC have it hard
- He says CSPPA are on the right side of the argument on BLAST but have been on the wrong side of many arguments many times.
- "If you are not willing to stand along side the weakest member of the union, with the least amount of influence, and the least amount of power, then it is not a union at all and you shouldn't pose as one." "You wanna serve a bunch of special interest do it, everyone else in esports fucking does, but do not pose as something you are not." "We love the players. I've been fighting for players rights for as long as I've been able to, but the CSPPA is not what we needed."
- "They are not applying the pressure to the right people, they are not fighting the right battles, they are not helping their weaker members."
- He says what orgs have done by keeping or hiring coaches is bad. "When you give up on holding an appreciable standard, you've lost the scene" "Competition matters, rules matter, punishments matter, achievements matter, excellence matters" "If you start stripping that away, you have nothing" "You guys need to take that knowledge and apply it sensibly."
- "Valve has sold you all down the river, they sold everyone in the esports scene down the river, tournament organizers are selling their talent down the river. Don't hate on them for sounding tired after a 16 hour day. Don't hate on them because the hype for a matchup they've seen for the 20th time in the past 3 months, they can't be as excited or it sounds contrived. Support your guys, they're there for you, these are your people."
- "This community has got to start acting like one for the first fucking time. Just put the petty shit away, let's try and fix this fucking scene while we still have one to save."
- "You can't rely on Valve, you can't rely on ESL, you can't rely on the CSPPA, you can't rely on anyone." "Once again, it's gonna be the likes of us, the amateurs, the people who give a fuck, rolling up our sleeves and grafting." "I'm old and tired and I don't want to have to do it again. People need to pick up the torch and do it."
- "Like Michal did, like Dudenhoeffer did. You see something wrong, fix it. You see somebody doing something wrong, call it out. If you think something could be better, let people know."
- "Vote with your wallets if you're not happy with the direction Valve goes in. If when we do get to the Major, they serve up another subpar, same old bullshit stickers and signatures package again, do not buy it."
- "You're a powerful block and if you use it correctly we can fucking avert this disaster."
- "I'm not doing another year in this broken, bust-up fucking scene, where everyone is miserable, everyone is broke, everyone is tired, and everyone is trying to fucking rob everyone else, blind, while the fucking people who are meant to be protecting you, are just fucking enhancing it and lining their own pockets."
- "I'm not doing it anymore and you shouldn't want to do it either."
- "I stand by every fucking thing I said. I mean it, because this game fucking matters to me, this scene fucking matters to me. I put my life into this, my adult life, and to see it in this state is fucking sad."
submitted by Tharnite to GlobalOffensive [link] [comments]
The case for the TPP
Background:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was a proposed trade agreement between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States, with Colombia, Taiwan, The Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka being potential members. It was drafted on the 5th of October 2015 and officially signed on the 4th of February 2016
However, on 23rd of January 2017, US President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum to withdraw the United States' signature from the agreement, making its ratification as it was in February 2016 virtually impossible Limiting China
-If ratified, the TPP would have strengthened American influence on future rules for the global economy. President Obama has argued "if we don't pass this agreement—if America doesn't write those rules—then countries like China will"
and it did four years later -I think that any person should look at China in its current state and say, "yeah, that's messed up."
-The way that the TPP would do this is by importing and relying less on Chinese made goods and instead favoring goods from TPP countries, which would hurt the Chinese economy
-The US and other members of the TPP could then force China to stop with the ongoing Uighur genocide and force it to liberalize its government in exchange for inducting China into the TPP
-This may seem like a pipedream, but even if the TPP is unsuccessful in doing this, I still believe we should import less from genocidal regimes
-
Best thing is, even though the TPP didn’t come into effect, it still forced Chinese leaders to consider domestic economic reforms seriously -However, with America's exit from the TPP, Asian countries are now more
dependent on China's economy.
General economic benefits
-
In economics, when there is a tariff on an import, it results in a deadweight loss. which hurts the average consumer
-
The TPP gets rid of around 18,000 tariffs, which would result in lower prices on goods for your average American, which would result in more money in the hands of working-class citizens
-The
World Bank and the
USITC both conclude that the TPP will increase U.S welfare while having marginal effects on overall employment and wages.
-Although there has been
one study from Tufts University that found adverse effects on the economies of all nations in the TPP, the study
has been scrutinized for its flawed methodology.
Increased Labor Standards
-The TPP obliges members to adopt and maintain laws and practices governing “acceptable conditions of work” in three areas: minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health regulations (Article 19.3.2)
-This is in addition to the ILO Declaration which means the International Labour Organization(ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up (1998), which include:
- Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining
- Elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor
- Effective abolition of child labor
- Elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation
-According to TPP Article 19.6, members “shall also discourage, through initiatives Parties consider appropriate, the importation of goods from other sources produced in whole or in part by forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory child labor.”
Enforcement of these labor standards
-Before addressing the TPP approach, let’s consider the US track record of enforcing labor provisions worldwide. Under the US GSP program, the precedent for enforcing labor provisions was set, which includes a mechanism for filing complaints against beneficiary countries for labor violations, with the option to suspend GSP benefits based on a final determination by USTR. Though trade sanctions are advocated as a “stick” for compliance, the actual removal of trade preferences is often viewed as a last resort. This partly explains the low level of GSP suspensions and trade sanctions. Before GSP was reauthorized, in June 2015, the United States was reviewing labor petitions against Georgia, Niger, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Thailand, and other countries.
-One high profile case of action was the decision to suspend the GSP for Bangladesh, which had long been under investigation for its labor practices. The decision came after a global outcry in April 2013, following the collapse of a garment factory that had had aberrant safety regulations, resulting in the death of more than 1,000 people.
-We see that the US is no stranger to labor rights enforcement across the globe
-Now let’s get to the actual TPP itself
-TPP Article 19.5.1 sets the baseline for the agreement’s enforcement: “No Party shall fail to effectively enforce its labor laws through a sustained or recurring course of action or inaction in a manner affecting trade or investment between the Parties after the date of entry into force of this Agreement.”
-Like other US free trade agreements, the TPP establishes a labor council of senior officials at the ministerial level to guide cooperative activities and work programs. The council will meet within one year after the TPP’s entry into force and every two years after that, which would make it unique among other US free trade agreements, which were nonspecific, with the council meeting “as often as it considers necessary.”(Article 19.12)
-”Each Party shall invite the views and, as appropriate, participation of its stakeholders, including worker and employer representatives, in identifying potential areas for cooperation and undertaking cooperative activities”(Article 19.10)
-There are also 3 TPP bilateral labor plans that include implementation and review guidelines,
particularly for Vietnam, which particularly faces poor working conditions and long hours - Government oversight: A standing committee composed of senior US and Vietnamese officials will monitor and ensure rapid response to compliance concerns. Ministerial review of the plan’s implementation will occur at regular intervals (the 3rd, 5th, and 10th years following the entry into force).
- ILO assistance: Vietnam will establish a technical program with the ILO to support the implementation of proposed reforms, and the ILO will issue a public report two years after entry into force, with biannual meetings after that for eight years.
- Independent monitoring: A three-member labor expert committee made up of independent non-governmental experts (such as the ILO) will provide reports of the progress toward reforms, with recommendations to the senior officials’ committee two and half years after entry into force and every two years after that(after eight and a half years, reports can continue every five years).
Environmental Protection
- TPP takes a series of steps, including levying sanctions and other penalties against individuals or entities engaged in this activity, to combat and prevent the illegal trade of wild flora and fauna.
- The TPP is very clear that it wants to promote the conservation of sharks, whales, dolphins, sea turtles, sea birds, and other marine species. TPP requires countries to institute measures such as “catch limits,” which lay out what and how much can be caught, as well as “bycatch mitigation protections,” which limit the accidental capture of non-targeted animals (Article 20.16.4)
- TPP protects the ozone layer by limiting the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances that are banned by the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement designed to protect the ozone layer. These substances include refrigerants, coolants, and aerosol-can propellants. TPP also promotes cooperation between countries to increase the development of cost-effective, low-emissions technologies and alternative, clean, and renewable energy sources(Article 20.15.1.) and (Article 20.15.2)
4.
The TPP eliminates tariffs on numerous environmentally-beneficial goods. -
As an example, tariffs on wind turbines will immediately go from 5% to duty-free, and parts for solar panels to Brunei will eventually drop from a 20% tariff to duty-free(Line 8541.90, page 286 for the lazy)
-There’s more at
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/tpp-in-brief-environmental-standards, but I think the above gives a good picture of what the TPP does environmentally
Common Criticism of the TPP
-The most common, at least among online communities, is the IP law that the TPP imposes, with it effectively setting strict US copyright laws on other countries in it
While valid, I believe that these critiques are overstated, and this can be summarized with this quote by the Australian Trade Minister that said, “In regard to intellectual property, TPP will not require any changes to Australia’s patent system and copyright regime.”
-Secondly, the IP law of the TPP “would reduce access to health care in poorer countries by increasing costs for life-saving medicine” -I have no way of verifying if this is true, because, as far as I can tell, no real expert has weighed in on this
-It is important to note that the new CTPP does not include these IP laws
-The other common criticism is that “it would allow corporations to sue x country when they pass a law that hurts their profits.”
-This is unequivocally false as Andrea Bjorklund, an expert on international arbitration and trade law at McGill University, said, “the investor will only recover if the investor can prove a breach of the agreement and can prove a certain measure of damages. So ‘lost profits’ are not a valid basis of claim. Rather, the investor has to allege a violation of the treaty.” She added, “it is true that any investor can attempt to submit a claim and can attempt to justify it as a fair and equitable treatment violation.”
-In simpler terms, this means that a corporation can only sue if it breaches the agreements of the TPP AND it loses profits
Is there any hope for the TPP?
-Before we get to that, it is important to acknowledge that the
CPTPP exits however, it isn’t as strong as the TPP mainly because of the lack of America in it
-In the background section, I mentioned how TPP was “killed” under Trump, but we have a new president now
-
Sadly, it seems like there isn’t much, with Biden saying "I’m not going to enter any new trade agreement with anybody until we have made major investments here at home and in our workers and in education” -
An even more dashing blow is the Buy American executive order that Biden has enthusiastically praised -
However, there is some hope with Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who has come in support of the TPP, as it doesn't allow China to become influential in the region -Overall, it seems like the TPP will likely not come back, at least not for another couple of years
Further Reading -I can’t review all the benefits of the TPP in a Reddit post, so here are some recommended readings for anyone more curious
Here's a nice way to read the whole TPP Brookings institute article about the case for the TPP, which mainly deals with the economics of it Badeconomics post about how the US gains from free trade in general submitted by MicroFlamer to neoliberal [link] [comments]
NYT article on scammers.
Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html [Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls? One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.
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2020 Year in Review -- As If You Wanted to Look Back At This One
Wow, is it time for the Year in Review already? It seems like only a couple decades have passed since January 1, 2020 -- a year some experts are now saying lasted a full double dog year, 14 human years, or about three stake conferences in length.
Although TSCC's shenanigans were overshadowed this year by outrageously insane behavior from every corner, TSCC nevertheless made its own valuable contributions to the insanity pile -- the icing on the cake, if you will, or perhaps more accurately, the dry heave on top of the stomach-emptying vomit.
But now, as 2020 comes to a close, let us sit back, reflect on the past year, and wonder what the hell was everyone smoking? Yet somehow, despite everything getting turned upside down this year, 2020 still began with . . .
January
Foreshadowing the year to come, 2020 attacks right from the start and scorches Australia with massive wildfires. Also foreshadowing the year to come, TBMs offer to help by skipping a couple of meals and donating the value of those meals to the church, which then used the donated money to pay the cable bill for Brother Richards in your ward. The logic behind this series of transactions is still somehow one of the least confusing aspects of the year to come.
Despite the Book of Mormon literally saying the Lamanites were cursed with dark skin, TSCC claims it was an "error" in the Come Follow Me manual that described the Lamanites' dark skin as a curse. Clarifying the clarification, Pres. Newsroom stressed that it wasn't the dark skin that was the curse, the curse was having to still defend the racist passages in the Book of Mormon in 20 freaking 20.
Finally in January, controversy erupts at BYU over, of all things, ballroom dancing, when BYU announced it would prohibit same sex couples from competing in the US Nationals Amateur Dancesport Championships it was hosting, despite national organization guidelines which allowed same sex couples to compete. Several prominent dancers announced they would boycott the BYU-hosted competition, but BYU stuck to its principles despite this withering pressure from super-intimidating ballroom dancers. Ha ha! But seriously though -- BYU predictably caved and allowed same sex couples to dance in the competition. Pres. Newsroom later defended BYU's changing stance, claiming the university had not sold its values for a mess of pottage but had done so for the glory of ballroom dance, which was a different matter altogether.
February
Two years after Ballard emphatically declared that church leaders weren't hiding anything, church leaders admit in a Wall Street Journal article that they've been hiding 100 billion dollars out of fear members would stop paying tithing if they knew about it. Following the example of shining role model, Enron, TSCC used more than a dozen shell companies to hide their investment portfolio from members. Shocked by this brazen deception, TBMs vigorously protest by continuing to pay a full tithe, keeping their mouths shut, and pretending this is all fine.
In an unusual move, BYU deletes the section prohibiting homosexual behavior from its honor code, leaving the impression that comparable hetero behaviors such as dating and kissing would now be permitted for homosexual students, with BYU's own Honor Code office privately telling students homosexual couples would now be held to the same morality standards as unmarried heterosexual couples. After a photo of two female students kissing outside the honor code office goes viral, BYU spokesperson Carrie Jenkins backpedaled and claimed there had been a "miscommunication", but refuses to say what the school's policy is. After much confusion, the matter is finally cleared up when Mormon church president Nelson issues a statement demanding the media stop referring to him as "Mormon church president Nelson" and insists the media instead refer to him as "brilliantly gifted heart surgeon Nelson".
A man wielding a knife is shot and killed by police after caught trespassing inside the MTC in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Afterward, police claimed the man was clearly suffering from mental illness, noting that he willingly entered a location known to be crawling with Mormon missionaries.
March
In March, absolutely nothing happened, so we can move on to April -- unless you consider the beginning of the apocalypse, the end of the world as we know it, and the imminent return of Jesus to be worth mentioning.
But first, in March: in the midst of continued confusion over the BYU honor code change, Ballard offers hope to the LGBT community when he delivers a BYU devotional speech condemning marginalizing anyone based on sexual orientation, calling it "evil and horrifying". Gay BYU students barely have time to applaud Ballard's speech when, the very next day, BYU -- which aspires to the level of evil and horrifying -- marginalizes LGBT students by issuing a formal letter stating that no, they are still not allowed any form of romantic expression because such behaviors still violate the "principles", if not the actual language, of the honor code. Clarifying the matter further, BYU spokesperson Carrie Jenkins said LGBT students should have known all along the honor code changes were meant for the Big 12 Conference and not for them.
TSCC gets pummeled from all sides in March, with God hitting Salt Lake City with a 5.7 earthquake that breaks the angel Moroni statue on top of the temple, and Covid forcing TSCC to cancel church services, close its temples, recall missionaries from overseas missions, close the MTCs, and cancel all BYU sports, just as the basketball team looked to have its best showing in the NCAA tournament in years. Summing up the disastrous month, Pres. Newsroom said TSCC hasn't taken a beating that bad since the last BYU-Utah football game.
April
In a historic first, TSCC cancels the live audience for general conference. The precaution was necessary, Pres. Newsroom said, to prevent panicky Mormons from stealing all the toilet paper in the Conference Center.
Recalling that last October Nelson promised a conference unlike any other, TBMs feverishly share wild rumors in the run-up to April conference, ranging from Jesus Christ personally appearing at conference to the prophet solemnly ordering members to pack up and move to Missouri. Realizing the conference had been a deep disappointment compared to expectations, Nelson tried to spin the narrative by insisting the conference had achieved a historic first: for the first time ever, not a single live audience member had fallen asleep during a session.
In the midst of a global pandemic, economic collapse, apocalyptic rumors, and widespread unemployment, TSCC demonstrates how keenly they are in touch with members' needs when they . . . rollout a new church logo. Dubbed "Snow Globe Jesus", the new logo design barely won out over top contenders Bobblehead Jesus and 70s Playgirl Centerfold Jesus.
Having failed in their first fasting attempt to eradicate Coronavirus, Nelson announces a second, more powerful fast to be held on Good Friday, for an extra spiritual power-up. Cases in Utah -- which averaged 100 positive cases per day prior to the fast -- promptly doubled, then tripled, then increased 5x, then increased 10x, then increased 20x, then increased 30x . . . Alarmed at the exponential increase in cases, Utah lawmakers hurriedly pass legislation preventing Mormons from conducting a third fast.
May
TSCC -- long accused of being a money-seeking corporation masquerading as a religion --releases plans for the Tooele Utah temple, including a master planned community of high-priced homes surrounding the temple which will be developed, and profited by, TSCC. When asked about the comparison to Jesus driving the money changers at the temple, Pres. Newsroom happily cited the prepositional loophole of "at" vs. "around" to justify TSCC's money changing behavior. When informed that the same Hebrew preposition means "at, in, by, or near" in English and therefore the church is technically still in violation of Jesus's injunction, Pres. Newsroom claimed his religious freedom was under attack from linguistics.
In the midst of a global pandemic, economic collapse, apocalyptic rumors, and widespread unemployment, TSCC again demonstrates how keenly they are in touch with members' needs when they . . . proudly release updated standards for the artwork permitted in church foyers. Although Caucasian Jesus predictably won the coveted approval, Pres. Newsroom let it be known there was stiff competition from top contenders Catholic Sacred Heart Jesus and Fat Buddha.
In what many observers regarded as a somewhat controversial move, two BYU students, Jeff and Steve, are disciplined by the honor code office for failing to say "no homo" after engaging in a handshake that lingered a bit too long.
June
In the midst of a global pandemic, economic collapse, apocalyptic rumors, and widespread unemployment, TSCC again demonstrates how keenly they are in touch with members' needs when Rebrand Rusty makes a fashion update to that most recognizable symbol of Mormonism, the missionary in the white shirt. Although missionaries may now wear blue shirts, over-zealous elders quorum presidents everywhere want you to know you will still be looked down upon if you wear a blue shirt to quorum meeting.
Three months after Ballard condemned persecution of the LGBT community as "evil and horrifying", TSCC files an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case, arguing in favor of the right to fire LGBT employees simply for being LGBT and not for any job violation. When asked whether the church was now "evil and horrifying" or whether Ballard had been wrong in his devotional address, Pres. Newsroom wondered aloud how difficult it would be to find another job in this weak economy.
In the face (ha ha!) of rising anti-mask sentiment, a coalition of Utah religious leaders sign a joint statement urging Utahns to wear face masks. TSCC is represented in the coalition by a counselor in the Utah area presidency, who ranks on the Mormon authority meter somewhere around the assistant secretary of the Beehive class.
In a fiery online speech, Bednar complains about the loss of religious freedom during the pandemic, claiming that governments had forced TSCC to shut down. When pointed out to him that other churches adapted by conducting online services, and that Alma 32:10 specifically says that meeting in a church is not required, Bednar doubled-down on his complaint, insisting that his religious freedom to sit on the stand and be adored by the congregation each week had most definitely been infringed.
July
In an all-out attack on exmos, the July Ensign boldly claims that truth will never be found on exmormon sites. Exmos quickly compiled a list of truths hidden by TSCC that were revealed on exmo sites, such as the $100 billion Ensign Peak investment, general authority pay, the seer stone translation method, the LGBT policy of exclusion, the multiple versions of the first vision, and church tithing money being invested in City Creek. When confronted by this list, the Ensign published a follow-up article claiming its religious freedom to lie about its religion was under attack.
Looking to send a stronger signal on the mask mandate, the full Utah area presidency now issues an official statement to members, urging them to wear masks in public. This upgraded authoritative mandate now ranks on the Mormon power meter somewhere around a ward PEC meeting with half the attendees asleep.
Finally in July, Utah County Mormons make national news when, in the midst of the pandemic, they crowd into a packed Utah County Commission meeting, purposefully not wearing masks, to demand that area schools reopen without requiring students to wear masks, because -- given the size of their excessively large families -- the least the school district could do is help them trim the number back a bit.
August
In the midst of a global pandemic, economic collapse, apocalyptic rumors, and widespread unemployment, TSCC again demonstrates how keenly they are in touch with members' needs when Rebrand Rusty renames the church magazines. The Ensign will be rebranded as The Liahona and The New Era will now be called For the Strength of Youth, because "New Era" simply wasn't weird enough. TSCC also dropped the old fashioned term "garments", now calling its special underwear For The Strength of Your Loins.
Colleges across the country begin to reopen, but with modified sports schedules, leaving independent football school BYU scrambling to fill its schedule at the last minute. Announcing its modified schedule, BYU noted that the 200,000 U.S. Covid deaths, while tragic, were a small price to pay to guarantee that BYU would not lose to Utah in football again this year.
And August wraps up with the First Presidency issuing a letter forbidding bishops and stake presidents from testifying in court cases, because the last people TSCC wants on the stand are leaders who have pledged to be honest in all their dealings.
September
Always striving to use the full name of the church and emphasize the name of Jesus Christ, Rebrand Rusty renames LDS Business College to Ensign College, after the itself recently rebranded Ensign magazine, with neither rebranding using the full name of the church or of Jesus Christ. This series of name changes is still, somehow, one of the least confusing aspects of 2020.
With the Covid epidemic worsening by the day, TBMs plead with God in fervent prayer to please let them die of Covid before they have to eat the 40 year old buckets of wheat in the basement.
October
Feeling like 2020 hasn't kicked enough people while they are down, Christofferson attacks a vulnerable group in his general conference talk by insulting single women who choose to have their baby rather than have an abortion, calling their children "bitter fruit." When asked about his choice of words, Christofferson defended himself, saying that he couldn't very well call them "bastards" over the conference center pulpit, now could he?
Two years after gaslighting church youth about polygamy at a Face 2 Face broadcast in Nauvoo, Master Gaslighter Cook uses his general conference address to gaslight the entire church over slavery and Native American relations. Boldly claiming the church was always against slavery and had great relations with the Native Americans, Cook spun a beautiful but demonstrably false narrative. It was somewhat surprising then, when independent fact checkers awarded Cook's talk the exact same credibility level as the other conference addresses.
The Book of Mormon becomes the surprise publishing hit of the Fall, with copies flying off the shelves, after Mormon Senator Mike Lee compares serial adulterer, porn-star banging, own-daughter-lusting Donald Trump to Book of Mormon fictional character Captain Moroni. Publishing experts scrambled to proclaim the Book of Mormon the next big hit in the popular billionaire porn genre, adding that a powerful, shirtless military captain in the early Americas breathed new life into the somewhat tired genre. Negative reviews soon killed book sales, however, with reviewers slamming Captain Moroni as "even more vanilla than my parents", with one reviewer tartly noting that even if all the "coming to passes" were replaced with "coming with lasses", the book would still be boring beyond belief.
November
With a contested US election, rumors and accusations flying on all sides, and the Constitution hanging by a thread, Mormon Senator Mitt Romney fulfills the long-awaited "White Horse" prophecy by saving the Constitution and the election by acknowledging that Trump lost the election and there is no legal path to overturn it. TBMs rejoice in the prophecy's fulfillment and delight in their role at preserving the US Constitution in such a critical moment. Ha ha! No. TBMs start a petition calling for Romney's impeachment, continue to call for overthrowing the election result, and demand that God himself reissue the white horse prophecy, with the "right" side winning this time. For his part, God answered the prayers of the right-wing petitioners in exactly the same way he answered Joseph Smith's prayer in 1820.
With the Covid epidemic worsening by the day, Nelson addresses the full church and kind of, sort of hints that members should maybe follow medical advice and wear masks. TBMs, who only last March were waxing poetic about God calling a doctor -- a doctor! -- to be president of the church during a pandemic, promptly ignore Nelson's counsel and turn to the real experts: some anonymous guy on Youtube and Aunt Phyllis on Facebook.
In what many observers regarded as a somewhat controversial move, BYU roommates Emma and Madison are disciplined by the honor code office for sitting too close together on the couch while watching a romcom on Netflix.
December
December opens with the traditional First Presidency Christmas devotional, but with the unusual sight this year of the first presidency seated in a socially distant arrangement. Noting the seating change, Nelson likened the social distancing to the Savior himself, who -- as in all things -- had led by example by socially distancing himself from the church for 200 years now.
In a final effort stressing the importance of masks, Elder Renlund -- himself a Covid survivor -- releases a video unambiguously instructing members to wear masks, calling it a sign of Christlike love. TBMs, many of whom opposed mask-wearing, thoughtfully ponder this clear counsel from one of God's chosen mouthpieces and reflect how to bring their lives in harmony with . . . Ha ha! No. TBMs excoriate Renlund for being too political and grumble that if everyone wears a mask, they might have to start going back to church soon, and no one wants that.
Fairmormon -- already sufficiently embarrassing thanks to its own tortured apologetics -- sinks to a new level of shame by releasing clownish videos attacking the CES letter on a Youtube show called This Is The Show, or TITS for short. As if that weren't juvenile enough, show host Kwaku El, in a fit of bravado, threatens to kill John Dehlin -- which even stiff-necked exmos know violates at least one of the commandments. Fairmormon's behavior is so appalling that even Tapir Dan Peterson, former Fairmormon shill and staunch defender, distances himself from the group and resigns from its board. Fairmormon's antics -- disturbing as they are -- somehow still provide a comforting assurance that even in 2020, when everything is upside down, some things still remain the same: the best weapon against the church isn't the CES letter, it's a passionate Mormon believer with a microphone.
And now, fellow exmos, as 2020 -- finally! -- comes to a close, let us gather our families together in the fallout bunkers where we are hiding, and wish each other a better and brighter 2021. It can't get any worse, can it?
No, really -- can it?
Happy New Year, exmos.
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NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
Fascinating piece published today by NY Times Magazine on scammer call centers in India. The reporter even tracks one scammer down, travels to India and confronts him. Link and article below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead? One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims
increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app
Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.
submitted by TheScumAlsoRises to Scams [link] [comments]
Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale Megathread part 2
With Black Friday sales ramping up, here is a fresh sale megathread as the cyber weekend nears. A HUGE thank you to
Octoember for getting the BF festivities started with the
Black Fri-Yay 2020 Sales Masterlist. Octoember opted for the mod team to post and maintain BF megathread pt 2, but a huge portion of the info here is taken from their post and collated by them - thank you!
This will be the dedicated thread for all Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales happening from now until next Tuesday. Please share any sale deals that you come across (including sale dates if possible) and let us know what you’re buying!
This post will be regularly updated to add deals shared within the comments. But please sort by “new” as well to see all the latest comments. :)
Thank you to everyone who has shared sale info with us so far! Other deals were also found on
/MUAontheCheap,
Temptalia,
9Honey, and
OzBargain!
Apologies in advance for any errors - please be sure to check sites for exclusions, T&Cs etc., and do your research before purchasing. Again, please comment if you notice anything wrong and we'll fix it!
Multi-brand Stores
- Adore Beauty (AU): Up to 40% off selected brands. 40% off Essie, L'Oreal Paris, Maybelline, Mirenesse, and theBalm. 30% off Iconic London, Cremorlab, Blinc, and Barry M. 25% off Cinch Skin, Face Halo, Heir Atelier, Garbo & Kelly, Nioxin, OPI, Pai Skincare, Real Techniques, Sebastian, and Wella SP. 20% off Alterna Haircare, Anitpodes, Avene, Biolage, Burt's Bees, Christophe Robin, Circa Home, Dermalist, Elizabeth Arden, Intraceuticals, Jane Iredale, Jurlique, Klorane, La Roche Posay, Lancome, MUFE, Nude by Nature, Redken, SALT by Hendrix, Sand & Sky, & more. 15% off Alpha-H, Benefit, Bioderma, Eye of Horus, Giorgio Armani, IT Cosmetics, Sachajuan, SkinCeuticals, YSL, & more. 10% off asap skin, Clarins, Dr Bronner's, innisfree, Kerastase, Medik8, ORIBE, & more. Full details here. Starts 27/11 12am AEDT and ends 30/11 11:59pm AEDT. Thanks to u/Kimmyonepilots for this info! See Coles "The Her Card" gift card deal at the bottom of this thread for extra savings. Also, CommBank is offering $10 cashback when you spend $50 at Adore Beauty (must activate via CommBank app), ends 02/12. Thank wherestherice!
- Amuse Beauty (AU): Up to 50% off selected products. Buy 2 get 1 free on full-priced items with code B2G1F. End date unknown. Thanks u/Bargain-shoppee!
- BeautyBay (UK): Up to 30% off. Discounts include: 30% off all Sample Beauty, By Beauty Bay, Revolution, Zoeva, bPerfect, BH Cosmetics, Melt Cosmetics, Ofra, Yes To, and Dose of Colours, and 20% off NYX. End date unknown.
- Beautylish (US): Up to 50% off, free GWP, and some limited edition new releases from 50+ brands incl. Charlotte Tilbury, Wayne Goss, Natasha Denona, Oribe, and Good Molecules. Full details & info on GWP here. Starts 26/11 at 12pm PST (27/11 7am AEDT) and ends 30/11 11:59pm PST (1/12 6:59pm AEDT). Free shipping to Aus on $35+ orders. Up to 40% off Jeffree Star Cosmetics, starts 25/11 6pm PST.
- Beserk (AU): 15-70% off everything. Ends midnight 30/11. Incl. brands such as Lethal Cosmetics, Lime Crime, Sugarpill, Lunatick, & Glamlite. Thanks u/thajane!
- Black Swallow (AU): 50% off Jeffree Star, up to 40% off Revolution, up to 30% off PLouise, 20% off Olaplex and hair colour products, 10% off electricals, and up to 50% off fragrance. End date unknown. Thanks u/kel-w76!
- Chemist Warehouse (AU/NZ): Extra 10% off storewide, valid online and in-store. Starts 27/11 and ends 29/11.
- Coles (AU): 50% off cosmetics. Excludes Mode, Every Day, and clearance. Starts 25/11 and ends 1/12. See also Coles "The Her Card" gift card deal at the bottom of this thread.
- Cult Beauty (UK): 20% off when you spend £20+ with code SPREE20. 25% off when you spend £100+ with code SPREE25. Thanks u/Visual_Responsible & u/poke-monica!
- David Jones (AU): BEAUTY: 20% off Estée Lauder (ends 29/11), Lancôme,
Clinique (27/11 only), Kiehl's (27/11 only), Tom Ford (27/11 only), M·A·C (excludes 'Viva Glam' Lipsticks, ends 28/11), Elizabeth Arden, Bobbi Brown (ends 29/11), Napoleon Perdis (excludes holiday gift sets), Makeup Forever. 40% off theBalm. 30% off Blinc. 30% off selected Givenchy. 20% off Giorgio Armani and YSL gift sets. 15% off beauty & fragrance from Giorgio Armani and YSL. 10% off Clarins (excludes gift sets). SKINCARE: 30-50% off on limited selection of L'Occitane products. Free gift with $90+ spend on full-priced L'Occitane. 30% off Natio, Philosophy, & Foreo (excludes UFO 2, Bear, and Bear Mini). 25% off Lano. 20% off Weleda (excludes packs and oral care), Vita Liberata, & Dr Bronner's. Buy 1 save 10%, buy 2 save 15% or buy 3 save 20% on Dermalogica. HAIR: 20% off Christophe Robin, Rock & Ruddle, and Aveda. 15% off Sachajuan, R+Co, and Louvelle. NAILS: 20% off OPI (excludes gift packs). FRAGRANCE: 40% off Kenzo (27/11 only), CK, & Davidoff. 30% off MOR, Givenchy, Jimmy Choo, Mont Blanc, & Coach (all 27/11 only). 30% off selected fragrances & sets from Versace, Dunhill, Missoni, Moschino, Salvatore Ferragamo, & Roberto Cavalli. 20% off Creed, Penhaligons, Amouage, & Clive Christian (all 27/11 only). 20% off DKNY, Zegna, Aramis, Michael Kors. 20% off selected Marc Jacobs, Guerlain, Narciso Rodriguez, Bvlgari, Issey Miyake, Balenciaga, Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, Dolce & Gabbana, Paco Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier & more. Use code BEAUTYEVENT, all offers valid on full-priced product only, exclusions apply. $150 off the Supersonic Hair dryer. Unless otherwise stated, offers should end midnight 30/11 AEDT. Full details & GWP info here. Thanks u/TheDefectiveAgency & u/da-n!
- Discount Beauty Boutique (AU): Up to 30% off storewide: spend $50+ get 15% off with code BLK15, spend $199+ get 30% off with code BLK30. End date unknown.
- FeelUnique (UK): Up to 33% off Black Friday Preview. Also 3 for 2 offers, daily deals and free gifts. End date unknown.
- Flora & Fauna (AU): 20% off Ere Perez and Viva La Body. Up to 40% off Elate. Ends 30/11.
- Glam Raider (AU): Up to 30% off selected products (incl. 30% off Made by Mitchell). Ends 30/11 midnight AEDT. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- Hikoco (NZ): Up to 50% off. Ends 30/11. Free NZ shipping for orders over $50. Free AU shipping for orders over $150. Thanks u/HalfJapaneseDoll!
- iHerb (Int): 12% off with code BFSALE12. Exclusions apply. Cannot be combined with other offers. Ends 1/12 at 10am PT.
- Life Pharmacy (NZ): At least 15% off beauty & fragrance. 20% off Shiseido, Clinique, Benefit, Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder, Versace, Azzaro, Mugler, Paco Rabanne and Jean Paul Gaultier. 40% off Maybelline & L’Oréal. Free shipping and sample bag with every order. Ends 30/11. Thanks u/HalfJapaneseDoll!
- Look Fantastic (AU): Up to 50% off. Offers include 40% off asap & Skinstitut, 30% off Dermalogica & Christophe Robin, 25% off Foreo, up to 25% off selected Olaplex, and up to $60 off ghd. End date unknown. Thanks u/Visual_Responsibleo!
- Mecca (AU): 6 x exclusive Mecca sets curated for Black Friday. Mystery boxes launching on 27/11: AU$76/NZ$85 for AU$152/$170 value. more info/discussion here. Thanks to u/kel-w76 for this info! Mecca may also be offering a free lipgloss GWP with purchases over a certain value (please check with store staff for details!) - thanks u/Veterinarian-Worried! Cyber Monday offer: 3 deluxe samples with every order, and free express shipping on $25+ orders. Ends 30/11 11:59pm AEDT. Thanks u/Makeuplife179!
- Myer (AU): 20% off Estee Lauder, Clinique, Tom Ford, Benefit, MAC, Lancome, Elizabeth Arden and more, including gift sets.
- Net-A-Porter (Int): Up to 50% off selected beauty. End date unknown. Thanks u/Makeuplife179!
- Nourished Life (AU): Up to 40% off. 50% off selected Black Chick Remedies. 25% off Pai Skincare. 20% off Ethique, Eco Minerals, and Foreo. 15% off Weleda and Acure. 10% off Dr Bronner's. List of all offers here. Ends 1/12 9am AEDT.
- Oz Hair & Beauty (AU): Further 10% off with code BFCM. Excludes hair appliances. 15% off skincare with code 15BFCM. 25% off Kerastase with code KERA25. 20% off Kevin Murphy with code KEV20. Codes do not stack. Ends 1/12. Thanks u/aromatic_writing !
- Priceline (AU): 50% off most makeup including Maybelline, L'Oreal, NYX, Rimmel, Revlon, Models Prefer, and Thin Lizzy. Excludes Essence, Luma and Opallac starter kit. 30% off Revolution, Milani, TheBalm, The Quick Flick, Barry M, ELF and Shea Moisture. 40% off Real Techniques, Freezeframe, and John Frieda. 50% off selected skincare, haircare and fragrance. Starts 26/11 and ends 30/11. Thanks u/kel-w76!
- RY (AU): Extra 10% off with code CYBER10. Free Black Friday gift set with $115 spends (contents unknown). End date unknown. Thanks to u/aromatic_writing & u/Kimmyonepilotso!
- Selfridges (UK): Up to 20% off with code SELFCCE. Ends 29/11. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- Sephora (AU/NZ):
15% off purchases <$120. 20% off purchases $120+. Excludes Dyson and sale items. Ends 27/11 instore and 28/11 12pm AEDT online. Thanks to u/Makeuplife179 and u/ravenled for this info! Online end date extended due to technical issues at launch. See also: Woolworths $100 Swap Celebration card tip at the bottom of this post. Cyber Monday sale: Up to 50% off selected items, incl. Pat McGrath , Natasha Denona and ABH. 15% off Dyson Corrale. Online only. Starts 29/11 and ends 30/11. Thanks u/Makeuplife179!
- Space NK (UK): Spend £100 get £25 off, £200 get £50, and so on. Starts 27/11 and ends 30/11. Free shipping to Aus on orders over £40. Early access from 11:59pm GMT 24/11 for Space NK’s N.dulge loyalty programme members. Receive up to three complimentary Charlotte Tilbury products when you spend £80+ on CT. Spend £80+: free CT Darling Easy Eye Palette. Spend £110+ free CT Darling Easy Eye Palette and CT Collagen Lip Bath in Peachy Plump. Spend £150+: free CT Darling Easy Eye Palette, CT Collagen Lip Bath in Peachy Plump, & Brightening Youth Glow. While stocks last. May be more worthwhile than purchasing direct from CT website. Note: Space NK removes 15% VAT at checkout, but shipping time is ~4 weeks. Thanks u/Makeuplife179, u/Margot_10enbaum & u/elpippi!
- StyleVana (HK): 15% off $49+ orders or 18% off $140+ orders with code SVBF2020. Also doing % off brand offers, incl. 30% off Iunik & Sulwhasoo. Free shipping on $55+ orders. Thanks u/elpippi!
- The Brand Outlet (NZ): Up to 70% off makeup and up to 40% off fragrances. End date unknown. Thanks u/yellowkittt!
- YesStyle (HK): 15% off everything with code 2020BLACKFRI. Minimum spend US$35. Ends 28/11 11:59pm PST (6:59pm 29/11 AEDT).
Cosmetics
- Ace Beaute (US): 45% off everything with code THANKS20. End date unknown. Thanks u/Octoember!
- Adorn Cosmetics (AU): 15% off $99+ orders with code BFCM20. Ends 30/11. Thanks u/aromatic_writing!
- Anastasia Beverly Hills (US):
30% off brow, palettes, blush & bronzer. 50% off lip, glow, contour, stick foundation & eyeshadow singles. Free glitter vault with purchase of any two 30% off palettes. Free shipping over US$50. Ends 6:59pm AEST on 30/11. Cyber Monday: 40% off Norvina collection, 24 hours only (exact end time unknown).
- Armani Beauty (AU): 15% off sitewide, 20% off sitewide for members. Use code CYBER. Minimum spend $80 and excludes Prive purchases. Members who spend $250+ will receive a free full-size lipstick. Ends 11:59pm 1/12 AEDT. Thanks u/secondpea!
- Australis (AU): 40% off everything. Excludes sale items and gift cards. Ends midnight 30/11.
- Beauty Bakerie (US): 40% off sitewide. End date unknown.
- Becca (US): 50% off holiday glow, up to 50% off selected items, free best-sellers kit with $65+ orders. End date unknown. Also, 25% off most items with code BECCAXOCTOLY25. Please note this is not a specifically BF sale, and Octoly may earn a commission on sales made using this code. Thanks u/anna_vee!
- BH Cosmetics (US): Up to 75% off sitewide, some exclusions apply. End date unknown. Black Friday GWP: free beauty sponge with all purchases, & a free mini Stellar Lash mascara with $50+ orders.
- Black Moon Cosmetics (US): Up to 40% off all single items and up to 25% off bundles and gift sets. No code is required. Ends 11.59pm 30/11 PST (6:59pm 1/12 AEDT). Thanks u/TheRealDrKak!
- Bobbi Brown (AU): 20% off sitewide. On Cyber Monday all orders $80+ receive a free 3-piece ‘Prep Your Pretty Set’. Starts 27/11 and ends 29/11.
- Charlotte Tilbury (UK): 40% off selected items and 2 of the same 12-shade eye palette for the price of one. 3 Black Friday mystery boxes available. Cyber Monday mystery item for $40. Full details here. Ends 30/11 11:59pm GMT.
Free Pillow Talk Palette of Pops Palette when you spend over $180. Ends 28/11 6:59am GMT. Thanks u/emimillie, u/coldfrz & u/ThatFireAlchemist!
- Clinique (AU): 20% off sitewide and a free 4-piece gift set with orders $100+. Starts 27/11 and ends 29/11.
- Coloured Raine (US): 30-90% off sitewide. Free shipping on $100+. Ends 30/11. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- Colourpop (US): 30% off sitewide + holiday vaults launch. Starts 5am AEST 24/11. Thanks to u/Octoember for this info! Offer changes to spend $30+, get 25% off your next order on 30/11.
- Devinah (US): 35% off with code BLACKFRIDAY20. Excludes empty palettes/Aurorae Flare products. Starts 26/11 12pm PST and ends 30/11. New Star Chaser collection releasing on BF. It will be 50% off. Thanks u/CHarroJ23!
- Dose of Colours (US):
Daily offers -- 24/11 PST (25/11 Aus): BOGO Free single beauty sponges, foundations, concealers, highlighters, and face brushes. 25/11 PST (26/11 Aus): BOGO Free single eyeshadows, 5-pan eyeshadow palettes, Eyedeal Duos, eye brushes, eyeliners, and lashes. 26/11 PST (27/11 Aus): BOGO Free single liquid matte lipsticks, lip glosses, lip liners, and satin lipsticks. 27/11 to 30/11: 50% off sitewide including sale items, free Sunset Eyedeal Duo with $40+ USD purchase. Discount excludes bundles, sets & skincare. Full details here. Free international shipping for orders $60+. No promo codes required. Thanks u/kindrex89!
- Elcie Cosmetics (US): 25% off $30+ orders, starts 25/11 and ends 30/11.
- Em Cosmetics (US):
Black Friday (27/11) - one-day only 20% off your purchase with code BLACKFRIDAY. Excludes new Faded Clementine products. Cyber Monday (30/11) - 15% off your purchase with the same exclusions - but exclusive lip bundles will be available. Thanks u/thiccbaobei!
- Emme Cosmetics (CA): 20% off sitewide. Starts 26/11 and ends 30/11. Thanks u/CHarroJ23!
- Enchanted Lustre Cosmetics (AU): 3 Mystery Prisms for $25, 5 Mystery Prisms for $35. Discounted grab bags will also be available. Starts 27/11 12am AEDT and ends 30/11 11:59pm AEDT. Thanks u/Octoember!
- Estee Lauder (AU): 20% off sitewide, starts 27/11 and ends 29/11.
- Eye of Horus (AU): 25% off storewide with code GODDESS25. Ends 30/11. Thanks u/aromatic_writing!
- Fenty Beauty (US): 30% off Fenty Beauty, excludes CLF. Get a free Fenty Skin bag with any $75+ Fenty Skin order. Ends 30/11 11:59pm PT.
- Give Me Glow Cosmetics (US): Juicy Olive Palette $24, Vintage Rose Palette: $26.80, Christmas Morning Palette: $26.80, Extra Spicy Palette: $30, Grunge Palette: $30, 9X Glow: $60, Summer Vibes Palette: $43.20 (all other palettes will be full price), all singles $5, loose highlighters $6, pressed highlighters/setting powders $12, 50% off magnetic palettes, lip products $5, Foil Primer $5, makeup bags $3 and 4pc brush set $1. Starts 28/11 at 8am EST. End date unknown. Thanks u/Octoember!
- Glamvice (US): 40% off everything with code BFCM. Exclusions apply. Ends 30/11 11:59pm EST.
- Haus Labs (US): Up to 50% off sitewide through 1/12. Free Glam Attack Liquid Shimmer Powder in Biker with any purchase, Black Friday weekend only. Free shipping to Aus with AU$100+ orders (pre GST). Thanks u/Samtown_!
- Huda Beauty (UAE): Up to 50% off storewide. Deals include: 50% off eyeshadow palettes, highlighter palettes & more. 40% off liquid foundation, lips, lashes, KAYALI & more. 30% off melted shadows, complexion, brushes & more. 20% off wishful skincare. Four BF bundles will also be available. Full details here. Starts 24/11 PST (25/11 AEDT) and ends 27/11 (28/11 7am AEDT). Thanks u/thatderncoreytyler!
- Illamasqua (UK): Up to 50% off deals + select a free mini on $50+ orders, starts 24/11 and ends 2/12. Flash daily deals on their Instagram also.
- Inglot (AU): 30% off storewide with code BW30. Ends 29/11. Thanks to u/aromatic_writing, who also notes that Ingot often does 30% off sales!
- Innisfree (AU): (Instore Only) - Up to 50% off selected products. Member early access 25/11 to 26/11. All customers 27/11 to 2/12. Full details here.
- Innoxa (AU): 40% off sitewide, starts 24/11 and ends 30/11
- JD Glow (US):
40% off storewide (excludes multichromes & palettes) with code PINKFRIDAY40. 20% off multichromes & palettes with code SPECIALEDITION. Start 26/11 12am CST (26/11 7pm AEDT) and ends 27/11 11:59pm CST. Thanks u/CHarroJ23 and u/Octoember!
- Juvia's Place (US): 45% off all lip products, up to 50% off everything. Ships within 24 hours. Discount codes may also stack on top of this. End date unknown. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- Juno & Co (US): Buy one, get one for US$1. Free international shipping on orders US$50+. Spend $40, get a $5 gift card. Ends 30/11. Thanks u/Sleepisbetter!
- Kaleidos Makeup (CN): 25% off everything (except bundles). 40% off Cyber Broze palette and Kaleidos Lippies. All orders over $70 get a free hair bow. All orders over $180 get a free Fresh Fantasy Suitcase and Hair Bow, the Original Mars Melter, and a Kaleidos Sport Towel. Ends 30/11. Thanks u/Octoember!
- Kevyn Aucoin (US): 35% off sitewide with code CYBER35. Ends 30/11 US time.
- KKW Beauty (US): 30% off sitewide, some exclusions apply. Ends 30/11 11:59pm PT. Thanks u/Riiseandshine!
- KVD Vegan Beauty (US): 30% off, starts 25/11 and ends 30/11.
- Kylie Cosmetics (US): 40% off lips, 30% off eyes & face. 30% off Kylie Skin. Starts 25/11 12pm PST and ends 29/11 9:59am PST. Exclusions apply. Free international shipping on orders over $60. Thanks u/Riiseandshine!
- Lancome (AU): Buy 2, get 3rd free. Lowest priced item free. Ends 30/11.
- Lethal Cosmetics (EU): Up to 40% off selected items. €20 shipping to Aus, free for orders over €150. Ends 30/11 midnight CET. Thanks u/thajane!
- Lime Crime (US): 30% off sitewide, 50% off holiday collection. Free shipping with orders US$50+. Free Remix Mini Lip Set with orders US$50+ (limited time only). End date unknown.
- MAC (AU):
20% off sitewide. Free bronzer with orders over $100, offer ends midnight 27/11. Cyber Monday offer: 20% off sitewide, online orders $65+ will receive a free five-piece gift set with code PINK20 or RED20 (for the lipstick shade option). Starts 29/11 and ends 30/11. See Coles "The Her Card" gift card deal at the bottom of this thread for extra savings.
- Makeup by Mario (US): 25% off sitewide (includes limited edition sets), with code 25OFF. Exclude Master Eye Collection & gift cards. Free shipping to Aus with spends $129+. Ends date unknown. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- MCo Beauty (AU):
Up to 50% off selected products, starts 20/11 and ends 27/11.
- Melt Cosmetics (US): Up to 70% off selected items, excludes new collections. End date unknown.
- Model Rock Lashes (AU): Various offers on selected products, up to 90% off. Ends 30/11.
- Morphe (AU): 40% off Morphe with code FAB40. Excludes third-party products & bundles, sale items, and Lisa Frank. Online at morphe.com and at Morphe stores. Starts 26/11 and ends 29/11. On 30/11 Cyber Monday, 30% off almost everything. Free shipping on orders over $30. Thanks u/da-n!
- Muse Beauty Pro (US): 20% off sitewide (some exclusions apply), starts 26/11, ends 30/11.
- Natasha Denona (US): Buy one get one free on selected base products & accessories. Up to 50% off selected eye & cheek products. Up to 30% off selected lip products. Free shipping on orders over $150. Starts 26/11 8am EST (27/11 12am AEDT). End date unknown.
- Natio (AU): 30% off sitewide. Starts 27/11 00:01am AEST and ends 30/11 11:59pm AEST. Thanks u/Tokatoya!
- Nikkia Joy Cosmetics (AU): 30% off storewide with code BF30. Excludes brushes and pigments. End date unknown. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- Nomad Cosmetics (US):
4/11 to 23/11: 60% off Around the World Palette. 24/11 to 26/11: Pre-BF Sale Buy More Get More off ($30/30% off - $90/50% off). 27/11: Black Friday 50% off Orient Express Palette. 28/11: Small Biz Saturday - 70% off 4 pack of highlighters. 30/11: Cyber Monday 40% off site wide. Thanks u/CHarroJ23!
- Nude by Nature (AU): 50% off with code BEAUTYDAY. Excludes sale and kids. Receive a free LED mirror with purchases $100+. Ends midnight 30/11.
- Nudestix (US): 40% off sitewide with code CYBER40, excludes hand sanitiser, kits & sale items. End date unknown. Thanks u/ofavonlea
- Oden's Eye (HK/SG): 40% off all products from 27/11 to 29/11 (European time). Also believed to have free shipping for spending over €50. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- OFRA (US):
$15 international shipping, 40% off sitewide, starts 11/26 and ends 11/26, $15 highlighters/blushes/bronzers, starts 11/27 and ends 11/27, $5 skincare, starts 11/28 and ends 11/28, 50% off palettes, starts 11/29 and ends 11/29, Super beauty busters, starts 11/30 and ends 11/30. Cyber Monday: 40% off everything with code BFCM20.
- Pat McGrath (US): 25% off purchases u/da-n, u/nesswabbit & u/daisyduke92!
- PLouise (UK): Up to 70% off everything. End date unknown.
- Private Society Cosmetics (US): Up to 70% off sitewide. End date unknown. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- Sample Beauty (UK): 40% off everything, check brand Instagram for codes for extra 5% off. End date unknown.
- Scott Barnes (US): 30% off sitewide "all week long". Flat rate US$15 shipping. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- Scotty's Makeup (AU): 20% off storewide with code BFCM20. Valid instore & online. Ends 30/11 11:59pm AEDT.
- Skindinavia (AU): 30% off sitewide with code CYBER30. Free shipping in Aus on orders over $49. Ends 30/11.
- Sigma Beauty (US): 40% off sitewide + up to 60% off selected items with code HOLIDAY2020. Free worldwide shipping no minimum ends 29/11 11:59pm AEDT. Spend $30+ and choose a free gift. More you spend, more free gifts you get in multiples of $30. 50% off Black Friday sets. Ends 1/12 at 11:59PM CST. Thanks u/Mostly-Relevant & u/iolanth!
- Sportsgirl (AU): 20% off all beauty. Valid instore & online. Ends midnight 30/11.
- Sydney Grace (US): 25% off starts 27/11 and ends 30/11. Free international shipping over US$150. Thanks to u/CHarroJ23 for this info!
- Tarte (US):
30% off sitewide and 50% off holiday steals with code CYBER. End date unknown. Cyber Monday: 40% off selected items (incl. Shape Tape range) with code OMG. Ends at approx 7pm AEDT 1/12. Free shipping on orders $80+. Free mascara & blush duo with purchase of 3+ items automatically applied at checkout. Thanks u/wherestherice & u/neuphss!
- The Quick Flick (AU): Up to 70% off sitewide. End date unknown.
- Thin Lizzy (AU): 50% off sitewide. Excludes bundles. Ends 30/11.
- Touch of Glam Beauty (US): 40% off foiled eyeshadows, highlighters, multidimensional eyeshadows. 20% off selected items incl. new iridescent shapeshifters, pastel & jewelled multichromes, and shifting glitters. Use code: TOGB. 20% off bundles (already marked down). Starts 25/11 and ends 1/12. Thanks coldfrz!
- Victoria Beckham Beauty (Int): 20% off storewide, applied at checkout. End date unknown. Thanks u/weisp!
- WeMakeup (IT): Up to 40% off everything. End date unknown. Thanks u/coldfrz!
- YSL (AU): 20% off for members with code MEMBER20, and bonus Rouge Volupte Shine Lipstick in shade 80 when you spend $200+. 15% off for non-members with code CYBER15. Only valid on $50+ spends. Ends 2/12.
Skincare
- Alkira Skincare (AU): 30% off sitewide, starts 23/11 and ends 30/11.
- Bangn Body (AU):
15% off sitewide, 27/11 only.
- Black Leopard Skincare (AU): 35% off with code LEOPARD35. End date unknown. Thanks u/Visual-Responsible!
- Boracay Skin (AU): 30% off sitewide, starts 26/11 and ends 30/11.
- BreezeBalm (AU): Up to 80% off sitewide. Ends 3/12.
- Deciem (AU): 23% off Deciem brands (incl. The Ordinary, NIOD, Hylamide). Ends 30/11.
- Everyday Humans (AU): 30% off sitewide, starts 23/11 and ends 29/11.
- Frank Body (AU): 20% off everything. Free shipping on orders $25+. Ends 1/12 9am AEDT.
- Kiehl's (AU): 3 products for the price of 2. Spend $200 to receive a bonus 8-piece gift with code 8PIECE. Daily flash offer with every $60 spent. Full details [here](https://www.kiehls.com.au/offers. Ends 11.59pm AEDT 30/11/20. Note: 25% cashback via ShopBack -- thanks u/dog-coffee!
- La Mer (AU): Select 3 samples with any $300 purchase. Your choice of sustainably crafted spa accessory and luxury sample with any $450 purchase. Ends 30/11 midnight AEDT.
- Paula's Choice (AU): 20% off sitewide with code BESTSKIN. Free 4-piece gift on $125+ spends, bonus full-size gift on $150+. End date unknown.
27/11 only: 30% off Black Friday Kit.
- Skin Republic (AU): 40% off sitewide (excluding value bundles), starts 24/11 and ends 30/11.
- Stratia (US):
20% off sitewide. Free shipping over $150. End date unknown. Thanks u/yendingo!
- Sukin (AU): 50% off sitewide with code BLACKFRIDAY50. Ends 30/11.
- Tatcha (US): 20% off storewide, starts 26/11 and ends 28/11.
- The Body Shop (AU): Up to 60% off on selected products. Offers include $5 shower gels and sheet masks, $2 bath lilies, $20 EDTs, $9 liquid lips, 3 for $40 jumbo haircare.
Ends midnight 29/11. Black Friday offers extended, and free shipping on all orders until midnight 30/11. Thanks u/aromatic_writing!
- Tribe Skincare (AU):
20% off site-wide and free express shipping, 27/11 only.
- Weleda (AU): 20% off sitewide. End date unknown.
Hair Care
- Arctic Fox (US): 25% off sitewide, end date unknown. Thanks u/cats_i_like!
- Aveda (AU): Pre-Black Friday offer: Free full sized bottle of either Damage remedy daily hair repair, colour corrective daily colour protect, be curly style prep or smooth infusion style prep, with any purchase of $65+. Ends 26/11. Thanks to u/-GailTheSnail- for this info! Black Friday offer: 20% off and free shipping with any order over $50. Starts 27/11 and ends 29/11. See Coles "The Her Card" gift card deal at the bottom of this thread for extra savings.
- Christophe Robin (US): Up to 40% off, secret flash sales, starts 24/11 and ends 2/12. Shipping to AU and NZ is $15.
- Cloud Nine (AU): $40 off all electricals. End date unknown.
- Dyson (AU): 2 free gifts with selected hair styler purchases. Excludes Airwrap Long. Ends 2/12. Thanks to u/bobot_ for this info! See also: David Jones offer under Multi-brand Stores.
- Function of Beauty (AU): 30% off when you spend $90+. End date unknown.
- GHD (AU): Up to $50 off stylers, dryers and curlers. Starts 21/11 and ends 4/12.
- Hairhouse Warehouse (AU): Up to 20% off haircare and up to $50 off electrical. Get a free $15 voucher with any purchase between now and Cyber Monday. Thanks u/flora_dora!
- Nature Lab Tokyo (US): 30% off shampoos and conditioners, starts 27/11 and ends 30/11.
Tools & Accessories
Nails
Tanning
- Bondi Sands (AU): 50% off selected bundles. Starts 27/11 and ends 28/11. 40% off on Cyber Monday, 30/11.
- Loving Tan (AU): 20% off storewide with code VIPBF20. Ends 27/11 11:59pm PST. Thanks u/hurricaneamy!
- ModelCo:
Up to 40% off selected products, starts 20/11 and ends 27/11.
- Tanzee (AU): 25% off sitewide. End date unknown.
Fragrance
- In Essence (AU): 30% off sitewide, starts 27/11 and ends 30/11.
- Jo Malone (AU): Free 3-piece gift set when you spend $130+. Free travel pouch with $175+ spend. Full details here. Ends 30/11.
- KKW Fragrance (US): 20% off sitewide, exclusions apply. Ends 30/11 11:59pm PT. Thanks u/Riiseandshine!
- Libertine Parfumerie (AU): 20% off storewide with code FRIDAY20. Includes Amouage, Cire Trudon, Costume National, Creed, Frapin, Goldfield & Banks, Juliette Has A Gun, L'Artisan, Lubin, Memo, Penhaligons, etc. Excudes Fragonard, Nasomatto, Santa Maria Novella & masterclasses. Ends 30/11 midnight AEDT. Thanks u/da-n!
Please leave a comment with any other deals you come across and we’ll get this post updated asap!
Beside each brand/store name you'll notice a location (in brackets). u/aromatic_writing suggested below that we include where each store is located and shipping from so that users can better judge where to shop from, and how long shipping might take. If a brand is marked (Int)ernational it may be because the company has distribution centres in a number of countries, or we know it's not Aus, but aren't sure exactly which country it is! If this info is important to you please double-check or contact the brand before purchasing as it may not be totally correct!
OTHER MONEY-SAVING TIPS & OFFERS
- You may be able to access discounted e-gift cards ranging from 3-10% for Myer, Sephora, DJs, Priceline and more through your union, insurance, or bank rewards platforms. Please see this table at Ozbargain for more info. Thanks to u/da-n for this tip!
- Woolworths is offering 2000 Points (equivalent to $10) with $100 Swap Celebration/Entertainment Card spend that is redeemable on Sephora. More info here. Thanks to u/da-n for this info!
- Consider using a browser extension like Honey to find coupon codes. Thanks to u/da-n for this tip!
- Coles is doing 15% off certain gift cards (starts 25/11 and ends 1/12, or while stocks last). The Her Card ($50/$100) can be used at Adore Beauty (online), ASOS (online), Aveda (in store) and MAC (in store) beauty-wise. At Adore Beauty you can't use it in conjunction with any other gift card or promo code. Full details here. Thanks u/Margot_10enbaum for this info!
- Check CashRewards and ShopBack for cash back offers and other deals while you do your Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping. Thanks coldfrz for this info!
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