re: "No, it's not a job. If you don't work for the IRS or Microsoft, but you call somebody and tell them that you DO work for the IRS or Microsoft, then you're taking part in a scam. I don't see any grey areas here."
I agree with you.
They are scammers. They are part of the scam.
I'm simply pointing out that from their perspective, this is "just a job."
We can differentiate between looking at this from a moral perspective versus a sociological perspective.
The people who work at the call centers typically know if they are working a "scam" or not. But this is a major industry in India and some other places. This is a "job" that people go to every day, whether they do it online from their home or go to an organized call center with cubicles, a break room, managers, an HR department, etc.
The same non-descript office buildings may house similar-looking offices in different rooms and floors, some of which are fielding incoming technical support calls, some of which house telemarketers selling timeshares or questionable but legal insurance schemes and some of which are lying about representing companies or government agencies they have no real connection to in order to trick old people out of their savings. The workers in these offices may well know each other and go to lunch, play soccer together, etc.
If you watch TV series and moves about crime, you regularly hear the criminals refer to "a job." They know that if they organize a bank robbery or if the organize a mass looting of a store, where they steal things for the purpose of resale, or if they organize a "long con" where they trick a wealthy widow out of all of her savings, etc... They know that these things are "crimes." But this is their "job."
But to say that something is "just a job" doesn't mean that that there is nothing more to it than that. For many scam call center workers, financial motivation may truly be the only reason they are doing the job. But it's not JUST about money. Many of them are intelligent, talented, capable people who could easily make as much money (or more) doing completely legal jobs. But the thrill of "the game" is part of the allure.
Within the industry, there is a lot of lore about how "rich Americans" and "rich Europeans" deserve to be scammed due to the way those people or their ancestors victimized the scammers' countries (India, Haiti, Nigeria, etc.). There is talk about financial "inequity" and "social justice." Most of this is just talk, of course. I don't think most of the scammers fully buy into it. But it's a big part of scammer culture.
You can see all of these things within the songs and music videos that are made by and about the whole sub-culture. There are even TV series - documentaries as well as scripted dramas and comedies - about scammers and scammer call centers.
