Is it just old people like me and Joseph Epstein, the author of this Wall Street Journal op-ed on phone and email scams, who are pestered with a continuous barrage of obviously phony calls and messages? After recounting several of the scammers he had been fending off he remarks:
I know I am not alone in receiving these fraudulent phone calls and emails. They seem to be part of modern living, a damnably unpleasant part. So relentless are these scams that one wonders how many people work to bring them off. (100,000? Perhaps many more?) The thought of these people setting out to work each morning to cheat their countrymen is less than cheering. Something has got to be done about it. But what?
I am not usually for big government, but I wonder if stopping all this scamming isn’t a perfect project for the federal government, since I gather these scammers work across state lines and many of them between continents. I wouldn’t, à la the Biden administration, call putting a halt to this vicious finagling “infrastructure,†but it is surely a nuisance and one that has doubtless resulted in financial ruin for lots of innocent Americans, many of them elderly.
As I’ve said before I don’t think that fines and/or imprisonment are the solution to this problem. I’ve already provided my prescription: let the phone companies charge a per-call fee, remittable to the person being called who would be empowered to waive the fee. They could even be allowed to keep a small amount, say 1% of the fee, for their trouble. IMO all but the most determined scammers would vanish overnight.
Do you still have a land line?
Most older people do. Get rid of it and you’ll have less problems.
So far, 4 calls today to my cell phone hawking car warranties to a number on the do not call list and my providers spam call blocker, there is still 7 hours to go.
Would prefer a cruise missile response. This is a Lensman Race and technology may not work as well as more direct methods.
No, Dave, even young people like me get these calls. I’m mostly depressed that they must work, at least at some minimal rate to justify the effort.
(Still have a landline, and about to get rid of it. But about one a day on the cell phone)
“I’m mostly depressed that they must work, at least at some minimal rate to justify the effort.”
That, of course, is the money line. My 88 yr old mother in law is a case in point. Many elderly, even with almost full faculties, are out of their element in detecting obvious fraud.
I like Dave’s suggestion. On the other hand, sometimes when I get such a call I will engage the qualifier so I can get the closer on the line who thinks they have a fish. I try to sound legit while I engage them in an extended Q&A . They ultimately figure it out and generally hang up. Time is their most valuable asset. Heh.
I know, its like pulling the wings off flies. But seems to put me on a do not call list.
We call screen on the land line and most are scam calls. The wife and I probably average a scam call day on cells. I sometimes get scam texts now. Need t do same thing with emails.
Steve
My wife and I have a land line, two cell phones, and several email accounts.
The landline gets fewer than two real calls a week. It gets too many fake calls to count.
We seldom use our cell phones. We have them for emergency use. Virtually all calls to the cell phones are fake. That’s several a day. We don’t give out our cell numbers, so I suspect the company (Verizon) or its employees sells the numbers.
Since we have retired, our several email accounts get almost nothing but advertising.
The temptation to cancel everything and rely solely on the US mail is strong.