Who's Calling?

   Time, time, time.  Who has the time, many of us wonder...and yet I am constantly intrigued by the podcast from AARP, The Perfect Scam.   On that series you'll may find yourself a bit susceptible to the number of scams out there as well as the number of people that fall for them; but then who hasn't suffered through a long presentation for a time share or a vacation property, all for the sake of a few free tickets?  Even on the phone, most of what scammers pitch are quite convincing (especially those prowling the personal ads and dating sites for those "seeking" companionship).  But one of the thoughts to enter my mind was how are these robocallers and scammers able to afford all of this, paying for so many calls and nabbing so many different numbers, often in the hundreds of thousands; and who has the knowledge and sophistication to run such a program?  Well, it turns out that it's simple enough for even the teenager next door to do it, according to a piece in WIRED; here's their brief explanation of how some of it works: Today, a single person in a modestly equipped office can make millions of calls a day by renting some server space, installing off-the-shelf autodialing software, and paying a VoIP provider to transmit calls.  Some of the software is open source, and VoIP carriers often advertise a month of free service as a way to entice potential customers.  Software companies offer everything you need in one package—a robocall starter kit, available for anyone to buy.  Best of all, it’s cheap: VoIP services cost three-fifths of a penny per minute, and that’s only if the call is answered.  Unscrupulous carriers openly advertise their services to those looking to make “dialer/short duration termination calls” --the jargony euphemism for robocalls-- and databases of consumer phone numbers are easy to buy.  “The technology has gotten so inexpensive that any person can become a robocaller overnight,” says Ian Barlow, who coordinates the FTC’s Do Not Call program.  “It’s easy, it’s accessible, and there are no barriers to entry.”  Once the software has been programmed to control who to call and when, the robocaller doesn’t even need to press a button to start making calls each morning.  The same technology also makes scammers hard to identify and track down.  Little wonder, then, that the United States is awash in robocalls.  According to YouMail, a maker of robocall-blocking software, Americans received a record-breaking 47.8 billion robocalls in 2018.  That works out to nearly 200 per year for every adult.  Personally, I receive (and block) over that amount of calls each month (my November total so far is at 552 blocked calls...yikes!)...new FTC laws allow phone companies to now start blocking any robocaller from utilizing a "local" area code to throw you off, but that is optional and up to the carrier to decide if it wants to do so (it's a bit expensive for them so at this point, many carriers are taking their time implementing such a tracking/blocking feature).

    So who gets hit and falls for these scams?  Surprisingly, the audience most targeted are the millennials; but money-wise it becomes the seniors who have (and do) the most to lose.  A "retired" conman explained to AARP how easy it was to lure people into a trap: Those who believe they'd never fall for a scam don't realize it's not about how smart you are; it's about how well you control your emotions.  Fraud victims are people with emotional needs, just like the rest of us.  But they can't separate out those needs when they make financial decisions.  That's what makes them vulnerable.  As a master closer, I made it my first objective to get the victim "under the ether."  Ether is that fuzzy state when your emotions are stirred up and you're so agitated that you won't know which way is up and which is down.  Once I have gotten you into this condition, it doesn't matter how smart or dumb you are.  Ether trumps intelligence every time.  The two most powerful ways to do this are through need and greed.  To find a client's emotional need, I'll ask a bunch of personal questions.  Then I'll throttle up the pressure by focusing on that need. "Oh, you lost your job?  That's got to be tough."  Or "So your two kids are in college and the tuition is driving you into the poorhouse."  Now the person isn't thinking about whether the offer is a scam but instead, "Here's a fix for my problems..."The other pathway to the ether is simple greed:  I just promise people they can make a ton of money.  The numbers as huge -- said the WIRED piece: If your phone is ringing, there's a 50 percent chance it's a robocall on the other end...some 130 million robocalls are dialed each day...In 2003, the government set up a Do Not Call Registry (donotcall.gov) to prevent unwanted phone marketing.  (Some 235 million numbers are now on the list.)

    Numbers aren't out for China (which likely leads the list) but what countries would you guess to be the leaders in smart cell phone ownership (that is, the percent of the population that owns a smart phone since smart phones are highly used in robocalls)?  Maybe the populous country of India (nope, they own about a third fewer smart phones than the country above it...Nigeria, which ranks right behind Indonesia). Number one is South Korea; but what was surprising was that numbers two and three were the Netherlands and Australia, respectively.  But taking those countries and slapping health care onto them doesn't present as much opportunity as the fourth and fifth countries of the U.S., and the much-sought-after-by-private-insurance-companies, the U.K.  That's where the money is and where the robocalls are headed.  As the Affordable Care Act (often known as Obamacare due to its passage under then-President Obama) begins to be whittled away by the current administration and the many opponents of Obamacare in Congress, the field for seemingly unscrupulous insurance companies are betting on the heady advice of the conman above, just cater to need and greed.  Promising high coverage with low premiums, the targets are often those both needing and looking for a lower health insurance premium (many of the subsidized provisions of the original healthcare plan have been removed by the current administration, including many of the subsidies which once helped lower-income people pay for such healthcare).  In a story in Bloomberg Businessweek, this issue was glaringly brought to the forefront as surprise* medical bills arrived for Marissa Diaz and her husband after he suffered a heart attack.  Here's what she discovered after-the-fact as bills of $244,447.91 arrived in her mail: Marisia soon learned about the policy’s limitations.  The Everest plan didn’t cover preexisting conditions, limited the number of doctor visits, and capped hospital coverage at $1,000 a day.  It allowed a maximum of $250 per emergency room visit and $5,000 per surgery, not nearly enough to cover the usual cost of those services.  Most benefits didn’t kick in until the $7,500 deductible was met.  And the listed maximum total payout of $750,000 was misleading: It didn’t mean the Diazes’ bills would be covered up to that amount after they paid the deductible; it just meant that if Marisia underwent, say, 150 surgeries, she could get $5,000 for each, leaving her to cover millions of dollars in additional bills.  How could this have happened?  Continued the article: The Diazes’ plan was nothing like the ones consumers have come to expect under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which bars insurers from capping coverage, canceling it retroactively, or turning away people with preexisting conditions.  But the law includes an exemption for short-term plans that serve as a stopgap for people between jobs.  The Trump administration, thwarted in its attempts to overturn the ACA, has widened that loophole by stretching the definition of “short-term” from three months to a year, with the option of renewing for as long as three years...When the Republican-controlled Senate failed in 2017 to pass Trump-backed legislation that would have gutted the ACA, the administration instead seized on the loophole allowing consumers to buy certain noncompliant plans.  Trump used an executive order to extend the time limit for temporary plans, which he and other Republicans talked up as a potential solution for cash-strapped consumers.  Healthy people, they argued, could save money by buying policies that didn’t cover perceived nonessentials.  

    Unfortunately the problem isn't limited to physical coverage as evidence in another article in the same magazine: Overall demand for psychiatric services has never been higher, yet the number of providers has been falling since the 1960s.  Psychiatrists are generally paid less than other medical doctors, they’re reimbursed by insurance companies at lower rates for many of the same services, and they absorb more mental stress than practitioners in most specialties.  There’s been a slight uptick in psychiatric residencies in the past five years, but more psychiatrists are leaving the profession than entering it, and about 60% are over the age of 55, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.  This is coming to a head at a terrible time.  Suicide rates across all demographics in the U.S. are rising dramatically.  Since 1999 the overall national rate has jumped 33%, and the spike has been especially sharp in rural counties—52% compared to about 15% in urban areas.  Rural Americans are twice as likely as their urban counterparts to kill themselves, and many of the stresses they face are getting more intense.  In the past year, farm incomes have dropped, and debt levels have risen at rates not seen since the farm crisis of the 1980s.  Somehow this struck a note with me because of reading an earlier piece in Mosaic, one dealing with people who had jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  Said one survivor: “I had made a pact with myself, and many survivors report this, that if anyone said to me that day, ‘Are you OK?’ or ‘Is something wrong?’ or ‘Can I help you?’ – I narrowed it down to those three phrases – I would tell them everything and beg for help.”  The piece continued: As he sat on the bus, where he remembers crying, yelling aloud at the voices to stop, nobody said anything. “It still baffles me that human beings can’t see someone like that, wailing in pain, and say something kind – anything,” he says.

    It's a strange world, even as current algorithms are working to remove "hate" speech and other words that incite from Instagram feeds and Twitter texts (Facebook reports that its algorithms are currently hitting a success rate of blocking 80% of such messages).  Said an interesting piece in The New York Review of Books: A critical surge in reight-wing extremism occurred when Obama was elected president.  Immediately afterward, according to the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, one in a hundred Google searches for "Obama" also included "KKK" or "nigger."  Stormfront.org, founded in 1995 by a former Ku Klux Klan leader and at the time America's most popular online hate site for white nationalists, saw by far its largest single increase in membership on November 5, 2008 -- the day after Obama's election.  And this from a piece in The Atlantic: As a shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, set about massacring dozens of worshippers at two mosques on March 15, his body cam beamed live footage to social media.  Soon after, Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, learned that it was being uploaded to the platform.  The company put thousands of human beings and a pile of algorithms to work finding and removing the snuff footage.  It was already too late.  As The Economist recounted not long ago, “Before she went to bed at 1am Ms Wojcicki was still able to find the video.”  And no wonder: It was being uploaded as often as once every second, a dispersal “unprecedented both in scale and speed,” as a YouTube spokesperson told The Guardian.  Facebook, also scrambling, removed the video from users’ pages 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours after the shooting.  Yet nearly two months later, CNN reported still finding it on Facebook.
   
    Such reactions and viewings are difficult even for the early founder of 8Chan, a free speech site founded by Fredrick Brennan and a site which quickly became a spot where several mass-shooters posted their manifestos before embarking on their killing sprees (such manifestos were cited by other active and potential shooters); Brennan now works on the opposite side, successfully blocking efforts to revive the site or others like it.  In a podcast from The Daily, Brennan told columnist Kevin Roose: It’s like they think this is funny.  I never had that on there, and you can check the archives to see that that’s true.  That “embrace infamy” thing is their thing.  And after Christchurch, after the Tree of Life shooting, and now after this shooting, it’s still there.  It’s like they think that this is all really funny.  Oh, we’re infamous.  We’re, you know -- I don’t know.  Sorry.  I’m just very frustrated...There’s obviously a problem in American society that shutting down 8chan is not going to fix, because the society gave rise to 8chan.  It’ll give rise to something else.  I’m not politically ignorant enough to think that, oh, we shut down 8chan.  It’s all over.  Obviously that’s not true.  

   Wouldn't it be nice if two such distinctive worlds could meet, the hundreds of millions of robocalls working to help people instead of feeding them more dribble, and if online viewers wanted to prevent a suicide instead of desperately searching for where it might be posted; so many people desperate to hear a voice, and so many voices calling.  It would warrant a change in behavior, one said to start at the top...but in today's world, perhaps it has to start at the bottom, at the individual level.  As the famous philosopher Lao Tzu** is reported to have said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

*A few tips on how to avoid such "surprise" or "balance" bills (as in "You owe this balance...") appeared in a brief article from Kiplingers (which is now taking over the defunct Money magazine)

**This from the Ancient History Encyclopedia: Lao-Tzu (also known as Laozi or Lao-Tze) was a Chinese philosopher credited with founding the philosophical system of Taoism.  He is best known as the author of the Tao-Te-Ching, the work which exemplifies his thought.  The name by which he is known is not a personal name but an honorific title meaning `Old Man’ or `Old Teacher’ and there has been countless speculation as to whether an individual by that name ever existed or whether Lao-Tzu is an amalgam of many different philosophers.  The historian Durant writes, “Lao-Tze, greatest of the pre-Confucian philosophers, was wiser than Teng Shih; he knew the wisdom of silence, and lived, we may be sure, to a ripe old age – though we are not sure that he lived at all” (652).  If he did exist, he is thought to have lived in the 6th century BCE.

Addendum:  As an added note of possible interest, here's what caught my eye of how we process "headline" stories (even if covered in depth) and only later (possibly) discover that there is more to the background.  I bring this up because even as we make decisions and perhaps judgements of others, there is likely much more to their stories and their histories.  So two things came up, that of the LeBaron family members apparently ambushed in Mexico (in my state the predominant religion here is Mormonism and the Church of Latter Day Saints); next to the relatives of Mitt Romney (whose father was born in Mexico), the LeBaron family is the 2nd most "storied" Mormon family in Mexico (returning in 1924 after polygamy was banned in the U.S. -- it's also banned in Mexico but, as in our state, it's more of a wink-wink, nod-nod ban). As it turns out, it almost becomes a story straight out of Goliath Season 3 with alleged illegal wells being drilled and water fights erupting in a foreign land (one of the LeBaron sons sits on the Water Board) As it turns out, it almost becomes a story straight out of Goliath Season 3 with alleged illegal wells being drilled and water fights erupting in a foreign land (one of the LeBaron sons sits on the Water Board).  It makes for interesting reading.   And secondly came this interesting story on the U.S. forces being ordered to abandon the Kurdish territories (except for the oil wells) and the background behind that issue...which was quite a bit more than appeared on the news.  That story is also worth reading and appeared in the New York Review of Books.  --And on a final note, the earlier post of impeachment said that such an action had happened only twice which proved confusing since impeachment proceedings were initiated against Richard Nixon.  Once it appeared that he would be removed from both houses of Congress, Nixon instead choose to resign; thus Nixon was technically never impeached, leaving the count to stand at two, Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton, neither of which was voted out by the Senate.