Reply All - #37 Taking Power

Episode Date: September 1, 2015

Chris complained about his cable company on Twitter. He was surprised to get a phone call demanding he delete the tweets or else be banned from the service. PJ looks into the story, and things get much stranger. Plus, a new Yes Yes No. Duck Army (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHc288IPFzk) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quick language advisory, if you are at all offended by adult content or if you're around kids or whomever, this is a very good episode to skip. From Gimlet, this is Reply Off. I'm PJ Vote. This week, we're back again. Back to the world of the internet. We have a story about a phone call. It involves Comcast, a company that's sort of famous for their bad customer service. A lot of people see Comcast as this big, powerful company that can and will do whatever it wants to its customers.

Being a Comcast customer can make you feel infuriatingly weak, like an angry mosquito buzzing in the ear of a giant. One of those mosquitoes is a guy named Chris Adams, a cinematographer in Nashville, and Chris wanted to discount on his Comcast bill. The company said no, and so he posted a tweet complaining that it hadn't worked out. Comcast then actually did give him the discount, and so he was happy. Happy until a few months later when his phone rang. Yeah, so I got this call, and I had a call. I answered the phone. This woman said her name was Indra and she was with Comcast. And she said she was with their, I believe their social media team or something along those lines.

She said that she had seen that I had posted a tweet about a negative experience I had had with Comcast. And so she wanted to know if that issue had been resolved. So I told her like, yeah, I'm pretty sure the issue was resolved. And she said, okay, well, since your issue has been resolved, I was hoping that maybe we could get you to delete the tweet because, you know, it is slanderous towards Comcast. She said it was slanderous towards Comcast? Yeah. Here on Earth, companies don't usually call their customers to complain about critical tweets.

And this call only got stranger. And then she launched into this whole tangent about how, you know, if I had tweeted something bad about an ex-girlfriend, like, oh, this good. girl being such a dickhole. And then later on, you got back together with her, she would be really offended if that tweet was still there. Did she use the word dickhole? She used the word dickhole. You know, I kept telling her that this is crazy.

And she was like, sir, I just finished her two-week training, and I'm literally reading right off of the script. And she said, it just doesn't sound like you're very loyal to Comcast after we fixed the issue for you. And I'm not loyal to Comcast. I'm loyal to whoever will give me the best deal. And she was like, well, you don't seem like the type of customer that we want. Okay.

Cool. Basically, it got to the point where she was like, sir, I cannot end this session until the tweet is deleted. And I was like, well, I'm not going to delete it. And she was like, well, if that's the case, then we'll put a note on your file, and you will either be fined or removed from Comcast as a customer. I was just like, what? Are you serious?

I was so mad, and I was just like, okay, you know what, fine. I'll delete the tweet, just for you. And so he did. With Kendra sitting on the other end of the phone, Chris deleted the tweet. After all, he was a mosquito. And besides, Chris had a plan for how this whole insane phone call could actually work out in his favor. I don't know if you saw this. I think it was on, like, his motto, like a couple months.

ago, but he changed one of their customers' names to, like, ask it on their statement. And so he got a billing statement in the mail that said, and so he called and, like, you know, got free Comcast for life, basically. Actually, it turns out it was two years, but still, not bad. Yeah. So at that point, I was just thinking, like, oh, I'm going to cash this in. But then Kendra told him actually, she wanted him to delete more of his tweets. Like, are you kidding me? And I was like, which tweets do you want me to delete? Andrew told him to delete any conversation that had referenced the tweet that had been deleted. And so I'm literally trying to find them.

And she was like, sir, are you just playing dumb with me? Do you think I'm stupid? Like, the tweets are right there. And so I hung up at that point because I was like, this is so annoying. Chris did what you do when you have a bad experience with a company. The thing that had gotten him in trouble in the first place. He tweeted about it. Somebody else chimed in and they said that they actually didn't think that the call

he'd gotten had come from Comcast. Chris checked with Comcast and they confirmed it. Whoever he'd talked to was not a Comcast rep. It was a stranger, a stranger who for some reason wanted to pretend that they worked for an internet company and convinced Chris to delete a bunch of his tweets. This was bizarre. Who would want to do that and why? Like, I really want to know what the point of it was, like what they were trying to

accomplish. He's got one theory. That maybe the person who called was a scammer, but the scam had just somehow gone completely off the rails. You know, maybe she was trying to get me to cancel my service, and then she was going to ask for information. I mean, that was my best guess. And she had just screwed it up by being, because she'd been so rude, you'd hung up before that could happen. Right, yeah. We looked up the phone number that the call had originated from, but it was just a generic.

Eric's Skype number. Dead End. We were able to find out, though, that whoever had run this fake customer support scam on Chris, they'd actually borrowed that idea. Hello? From its inventor. One second. Can you hear me? Yeah. When the phone rang over here and I picked it up, the caller ID said Walmart. Yeah, it does that. I have all these pre-programmed caller ID things and say I'm pretending to be with Comcast. I will make my phone number show 1,800 Comcast. And how many like preloaded fake companies do you have in your thing? It's a it's called a SIP client. It runs on a different computer that I'm on right now. And it's just a drop-down box and I can just choose one.

You know, I have a few area codes spread around the country. So if I just need to make a quick call and want my call or ID to show up is California, I have some California number in there. And then I have a pay phone at the Portland airport in Oregon. So this is Brad Carter. I don't know where he lives, and I'm pretty sure that's not his real name. And that system that Brad uses, Brad could use it for a lot of illegal stuff. But Brad says he's not into that.

He's into prank phone calls. He's a prank phone called Da Vinci. Brad says that the scam Kendra ran on Chris? That's one of his inventions. I don't mean to brag, but I pioneered that years ago, and everyone does it now. What do you mean you pioneered it? I think in 2010, maybe. I think I saw someone complain on Twitter about something.

And I thought, oh, I wonder if I can just find other people that complain and give them a call. And it turned out to be a really easy thing to do. How many have you been prank calling people? I guess I started when I was probably under 10. My older brother started making prank calls with me. And he grew out of it, and I didn't. And now I'm 42 and still doing it. Brad told me that back in the 90s, when Jenny Ringley started the first webcam, he used to prank call her.

He can't remember what he would say. he just remembered the thrill of watching a person on a screen, somewhere far away, walk across a room because of a phone call he'd made. And these days, Brad can use the power of phones to affect massive companies. He told me about another prank call tactic that he likes to use. I'll call up a Domino's location somewhere in the country, and I'll say, hey, this is the corporate office. We're having problems with your computer. Can you give me a bunch of your customers' names and phone numbers who just ordered pizzas? And they'll do it.

It's really, really easy. which is kind of scary. Wow. But I stick to the easy ones. Comcast will do it. Really? Comcast is easy. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you can call Comcast and say, hey, I'm in a different department. And, you know, you're having computer problems. So pull up the last few orders you just did and give me all the information from them. And they'll do it? They've done it? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, most of the time they'll do it. It's not hard to imagine somebody with much more malicious intentions, taking Brad's techniques and using them to take people's money. Brad said he didn't know who would use his customer service trick, but he promised to reach out to his friends and see if any of them might know who was behind it. Meanwhile... PJ?

Hi. PJ, meet Matt. Matt, meet PJ. Hey, Matt. How are you? We took our question right to the top. Matt Maleski is Comcast's head of security. His job is to protect his customers against hackers and scammers and people like Kendra.

And that requires a small army. So in my team, we have approaching a hundred, people who are working on this. Wow. I don't think I pictured. I think I pictured like six people. No, it's probably, I mean, it's one of the largest, I'm sure, in the industry. And what's your, just like your typical day at Comcast, what's it like? Oh, it's, you know, unicorns and rainbows. Matt hates any threat to his customer security, whether it's an actual attempt at fraud or just a

prank. He kind of sees them all in the same category. And he really hates this technique that Brad invented. You know, I don't know that frustrated quite captures the level of anger that, that, you know, I experience when I see something like that. But, you know, really more so for the customers themselves who have been exploited and whose trust has been betrayed, you know, that's the type of stuff that keeps us up in night. I pointed out to Matt that in some ways Comcast itself was to blame, since if they did have a better customer service reputation, their customers wouldn't be so quick to believe that a Comcast employee might call them a dickhole. And Matt said, sure, Comcast's past mistakes are a tool that the scammers use.

They're leveraging the fact that in the public there's been stories of poor customer service experiences. You know, some of those things that are out there, if those things are true and have occurred in the way they're described, then we've done some of that to ourselves. And now it's how do we recover from that, which, as we've said publicly, we're working to correct and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars towards that effort. I talked to Matt for an hour, and in that hour, I felt something I really didn't expect to. I felt sympathy for Comcast. Comcast is powerful, but talking to Matt, I realized that their size also makes them vulnerable. Comcast has 22 million broadband customers. And Matt has to keep all those people safe.

When he describes a typical day at work, it sounds like he's a general leading a country through a war. You come in, you meet with your team, you try to understand what, if any new threats, are sort of emerging, there's always something different for us to focus on at any point in the day. We're a big target, you know. I kept asking Matt to speculate on who might have called Chris. He said he didn't know who it was, but even if he did, I had the feeling he wouldn't want to give his enemy the dignity of a name. You know, it's an ever-changing world and that we sort of live in a sort of chaotic balance

between, you know, good and evil, the bad guys that are out there trying to make money off of our customers or exploit them for a profit or for jokes. But, you know, we sort of embrace that role, and we hope that it helps our customers over time understand the value of the service that we offer. So we were stuck. Until a few days later, when Brad, our prank caller, got back to us. He'd reached out to some friends who also make prank phone calls,

and he said there's one person who we wanted us to talk to. Her name was Mistress Morgan. I sent her an email, and in the meantime, I googled her and found a video that she'd made. Oh, God, you're back here again. Back to the world of the internet, where the ladies don't have to actually see how pathetic and small your little cock is. Turns out she's an online dominatrix, a fairly hardcore one.

She sort of looks like Amy Winehouse. Sometimes she has long dark hair. Other times she has long blonde hair. Yesterday, she tweeted that her boobs aren't real, but she is, losers, and that she's your worst nightmare. She's the creator of such videos as Paid to Smoke and Ignore You, which is $8.99. And face it, you're a bootlicking pervert freak,

which goes for $7.99. You're always going to pay gorgeous women like me to humiliate your lame ass. It was not immediately clear to me what this Get licking, you little foot bitch. Had to do with Comcast. But as somebody who's never been humiliated, by a professional.

I had a lot of questions. How did you find out that you were good at this? At, like, online dominatrix? Yeah. I said. I don't know. Maybe I've always just been a bossy bitch. I don't know.

I also like to think I'm pretty good at reading people. A lot of the times, and I know it probably sounds a little crazy, but I'm able to even discern sort of what industry they work in within, like, the first few minutes of talking to them on the phone. And I'll get it right at least like 80% of the time. Another specialty of Mistress Morgan's is what's called a blackmail contract. Say you're a guy who's always wanted to try having sex with another man, but you've been too scared. You'll make a contract with Mr. Morgan. You'll give her humiliating pictures of yourself. And if you don't follow through, she'll send those pictures to your boss. Morgan says online dominatrix thing is a ton of work.

Sometimes she can have 14-hour days. Although recently, she's been cutting back. I've been kind of like feeling a little burnt out with the dominatrix stuff in the last few months, but I've also been doing a crap ton of prank calls. So I've been working like way, way, way less than I normally do. So prank calls. Prank calls are Mistress Morgan's new passion. She doesn't make any money from her, but she loves them, spends hours on them every day. And this isn't because she has some huge vendetta against Comcast. She's Canadian. They don't even have Comcast there. Instead, she likes to do prank calls because they're really fun. And when it's fun, like when a prank call is really working, like what does it feel like?

It gets really exciting. I know this probably sounds like a little silly, but yeah, when you actually get someone to do what you're wanting them to do or else it goes like a completely different way, yeah, it's like it's exhilarating. And this is the thing that surprised me the most. The reason Mrs. Morgan loves doing prank calls. It's not just that they're funny, although they are. It's not just that she likes having power over strangers, although she does. For Morgan, the real reward of all of this is an incredibly wholesome reward. Friendship.

There's like a really massive, great community. Yeah, I found like a whole sort of, it sounds kind of cheesy, but like, you know, a family of friends that I never otherwise would have talked to or even got to know. It turns out that the same way that Gimlet is a network for podcasters, there's also a network for these prank callers, prank call nation. Global Chaos Radio contains adult language, adult content, and psychological nudity. You can download Prank Call Nation shows, you can watch them live on Mixler, you can see them on YouTube, and they have a ton of shows.

Party Time with Laft Track, Matt and Zacks, mop riding with Dwight, Madhouse Live with Carlito. Brad Carter has a show with Prank Call Nation called The Snowplow. show. You guys leaving notes on car windows. And Morgan now has her own show. Hello people. It's Mistress Morgan. I hope you guys are all doing fantastic. I hope you guys are ready. The audiences for these shows aren't huge, but you get the feeling that the hosts are also

just doing them for each other. We do like conferences almost every night. And when you say conferences, like we'll be on Skype? Is it like... Yeah, we do Skype conferences, almost on a nightly basis, at least for a few hours every night. Do people, is it like I had a good call today or is it like I'm worried about my job? Like what do people talk about? No, usually we actually, we do more prank calls. So I described Chris's call to Morgan and I asked her if it rang about. Yes, yes.

I know exactly what call you're talking about, actually. And the reason that Morgan does remember this call and remembers it fondly is because she has this friend Macron. And Macron also likes to prank and he lives in England. So if Morgan stays up really late at night in Vancouver and Macrons awake in England, they can find this window of time where they can connect halfway across the world to bug some random dude from Nashville. Chris was the third wheel to their relationship. He just didn't know it.

And what do you think I should tell the guy Chris who sort of sent me on this whole thing. Like what do I tell him? I don't know. You can tell him that it was all a joke and that he didn't pass the... test. And what was the test? Well, like, I don't know. I think to myself, if I were to get a call like that, first of all, would a customer

service representative use, like, a dickhole? Oh, yeah. Looking back on it now, it's like, I mean, it's very, it's obvious that I shouldn't have even gone along with it, but it was just, I guess, the mood of the day I was in. I called Chris back to tell him the truth about Kendra from Comcast. Do you feel at all like you had a non-consensual experience of domination? I guess I could say that. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't feel as though I was dominated, although I did delete the tweet, which was dumb. So maybe I was. I mean, that was something she wanted you to do that you didn't want to do, but you did. Right, yeah. As for Comcast, they can't really win. Chris feels the exact same as he ever did about them, which is to say he doesn't like him very much.

I can give Gumpcast, you know, like a C-plus. Were you satisfied with your customer service from Reply All? Absolutely. I would give Reply All an A-plus. Thank you. Oh, also, we have tape of the call so we could send you it if you want. All of her and I? Yeah. Oh, no, that's the worst.

I probably sound like such an idiot. It seems a little while ago, I guess you were having some issues with Comcast. I was just calling to see if those issues got resolved as of yet. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they did. They did. Okay. Were they fully resolved to your satisfaction?

Yes, I believe so. Okay. Well, that's perfect. Is there any reason why the tweet is still up? After the break, we have a new yes, yes, no. Stick around. You know, if you were having a fight with a loved one, for example, and, you know, you guys made up and made it better, you wouldn't walk around with them with a shirt that said this person beside me is a real dickhole or, you know, whatever, you know, because this situation's already been resolved.

I couldn't disagree anymore, but. And now back to our show. Welcome once again to yes, yes, no, the segment of the show where we force our boss, who's a guy with stuff to do to wade headlong into the inanity of the internet and see if he can make. heads or tails of it. The answer is usually no. Very happy to be here. All right, so I have a tweet here. It's from a guy named Leon, who has an animated gif as his Twitter avatar.

First of all, I would have known all that lingo. I feel like you guys have like, I would have known that lingo. Your student has come far. I feel like you're at the level, like the way people speak like conversational Spanish. Yeah, exactly. Conversational Internet. So first read what the tweet actually says. All right. And so the tweet

says, it's too early. this shit. And then he links to three headlines. One of them is from The Guardian. It says what the terrifying geese finds says about our poultry-obsessed culture by Felton Brittenham. Another one says, my child saw a horrifying video of toy geese and she started crying. And what outlet published that second one? The hellish sound of geese toys yelling is a perfect analogy for Trump's campaign. Oh, subhead crying foul. F-O-W-L, which I don't even know what this is about that, but I'm already like, don't do that.

Okay, so first of all, PJVO, do you know what this tweet is about? No. House Goldman, do you know what this tweet is about? Yes. Alex Bloomberg. Do you know what this tweet's about? No. But I think we're understanding it at the same level, which is like the analysis, but not the object of the analysis.

Yeah, I understand that there's, so something happened on the internet that set off sort of like an outcry and an outpouring of think pieces almost simultaneously. Yes. And the thing seems to have something to do with the vine and geese. Are you guys ready? Yeah. All right. I'm going to emmite shamel on you guys real quick. What do you mean?

Okay, so... Is this where I find out you've been dead the whole time? Yeah. He's not here. So someone posted a video today. Today? I'm pretty sure it was today. Oh, this is a hot meme.

This is right off the meme press. It was a video, it was a YouTube video called Duck Army. I'm going to play the sound here. Wait, but he said a vine. It started as a vine. It's now on YouTube. Okay. Here is Duck Army in its entirety.

Are you ready? Yeah. That's amazing. So for people not in the studio, it is a video of someone who found a sort of like a cage at what looks like a department store full of these inflatable squeaking. A cart, like a big cart. Like a big sort of like shop, it's not a shopping cart, but it's like sort of an industrial-sized shopping cart where they clearly move merchandise around the floor. It's filled with these inflatable geese or ducks. And he squeezes one.

He squeezes one and it makes one funny squeaking noise. And then he puts his hand into the cart and presses down on all the docks. And you hear the collective inhale of hundreds of duck toys. And then they just go, ah! Good reenact, man. Thanks. All right. We should do a show where you just reenact find.

videos like America's most wanted. So Leon's tweet was a tweet of a bunch of headlines that were about this this vine. Now that we've seen it can we just look at the headlines again? Yes. Okay. What the terrifying geese finds

about our poultry obsessed culture. Oh, get out of the air. Are you serious? My child saw a horrifying video of toy geese since she started crying. Our memes good if they come at the cost of our children's health. Tell your kid to get off the internet. The hellish sound of geese toys yelling is a perfect analogy for Trump's campaign. I guarantee you it's not. All right.

All right, guys. Now I'm about to shamal on you. Oh. Leon made all of those up. Wow. Those are all fake headlines he made as sort of a reaction to the Internet's take culture. Take culture. There's a thing on the Internet is called a hot take.

Oh. That's when you produce very quickly a sort of disingenuous opinion piece. Got it. Why twerking is inappropriate in the wake of the Malaysian Airlines crash, you know, like just garbage like that. So when someone does something where you can tell that that's what they're up to, it sounds you can just respond. Hot take. Right. So Leon, as a joke, saw this video that had gone viral and was like, you know, I'm wondering what would be just barely plausible enough.

To trick us. Yeah, tricked you guys. Yeah, totally. Oh, man, I was just bragging this morning about how I don't get tricked by stuff anymore. It might have been the way I set it up, but I'd like to think that it's just because you've got tricked. I got tricked. So the giveaway is if you look at the names of the authors, Felton Brittenham, sounds pretty ridiculously made up. Jessica, Mary Williams, Jessica with a G.

And then Kimmathy Branigan. Yeah. You don't meet a lot of Kimmethys. But everything else about these, which are supposedly ran in the Huffington Post. Oh, that's Salon. He's making fun of a specific writer there. And The Guardian. The Guardian.

The Guardian seem eminently plausible. I feel like there could be. There's probably someone raised to the Guardian named Felton, Brittenham. So, okay, so I got this. All right. Yeah. Leon, in a meta comment about the Internet and how it's always rushing to have the hot take think piece about whatever has just happened on the internet, saw the inflatable

geese vine, laughed along, I have to assume, laughed like everybody who saw it, and then immediately set about composing his master tweet condemnation of internet take culture by writing faux think pieces before anybody could actually write them and tweeting about them saying it's too early for this shit. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So we've been here for a while. Do you feel smarter? Smarter is not the word I'd use. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinnamennany, and Fia Benin.

Production assistance from Sylvie Douglas, and this is Sylvie's last week at Reply All. We are going to miss her. Thank you very much, Sylvie, for all your hard work. We were mixed this week by David Herman. Matt Lieber is a jump off the high dive. Our theme music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.

on slash reply all. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.