Spammers, scammers and other pests
Back in the dark ages of telecommunications, before caller ID became available, you probably were stuck talking to a telemarketer when you answered the phone because you just never knew who was calling. Was it Grandma wanting to wish you a happy birthday? Did one of your kids need a ride home? Or was it “Wally” from the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Associations, offering you a chance to fight crime by buying a raffle ticket? Hint: It usually was “Wally.”
I was never one to stay on the line with a telemarketer or other huckster, mainly because I lack the patience to wait for a pause in the spiel to say, “Please remove me from your call list.” So I would hang up silently, hoping that they’d keep talking to dead air for a minute or so.
Now that my cellphone has been my only line for almost 20 years, I can block unknown callers, and I’ve compiled an ever-growing list of numbers from which I will not answer a call. You might say that I could be missing important calls, but I’m of the opinion that if a caller has something really important – even urgent – to tell me, they’ll leave a voicemail. I can think of only a handful of missed calls over the past several years that fell into the “important” category. “Wally” hasn’t called in decades; many messages tell me that the non-existent extended warranty on my car is about to expire.
I’m willing to bet that even telemarketers don’t want to get a call from another telemarketer. But even worse are phone scammers, and a disturbing story I heard on NPR recently detailed how scammers operate. One fraudster tricked an unsuspecting woman into giving him almost $600,000 because she thought she was assisting an FBI agent in a sting operation. So I’m happy to report that someone had found a novel way to help consumers combat telephone fraud.
In mid-November, British telecom company Virgin Media O2 (O2) unveiled a chatbot, dubbed “Daisy.” Daisy joins the ranks of human “scambaiters” – people who take calls from scam artists in order to obtain information that law enforcement can use to thwart the schemes. O2 put Daisy’s phone number on a list known to be used by scammers. Daisy can keep such callers on the line for hours by conducting conversations that appear to be coming from an older adult, a typical target of scammers.
Actual conversations shown in an introductory video made available by O2 reveal scammers becoming increasingly frustrated as Daisy rambles on. After she appears to have difficulty following instructions on how to access financial data on her computer, Daisy tells a scammer, “It’s showing me a picture of my cat, Fluffy.” In another exchange, a frustrated scammer says, “Stop calling me ‘Dear,’ you (expletive)!” To which Daisy replies, “Got it, Dear!”
Daisy is played by British actress Amy Hart, who herself once lost £5,000 ($6,300) to a phone scammer. O2 said that 21% of Britons have been targeted by phone scammers; that percentage is mirrored in the U.S. According to figures compiled by the makers of Truecaller, a leading scam-blocking phone app, Americans lost $25.4 billion to phone scammers in 2023.
I should warn you that scammers also use text messages. Ironically, while I was writing this column I received a text message that said, “Your benefits food has been deactivated,” along with a number to call to reactivate. I don’t have “benefits food,” nor do I know what it might be.
Maybe next they’ll text the menu.