Today, Explained - All my friends are robocalls

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

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Are you still there? Every week, I get about a dozen robocalls on my cell phone, sometimes more. The calls usually share my area code or a nearby area code I recognize. Some of the calls are about health care. Some are about the IRS. Some just immediately disconnect. One thing all the calls share is that they are super annoying. Simon Van Zwielen Wood knows a lot about robocalls.

I don't, you know, I'm not the expert on, the world expert on robocalls. Maybe I am, but I don't think I am. I don't want this to be like the thing that I make my career about. He became familiar with them because they were so annoying. One of the first jobs I had, I was working at a political magazine in DC

several years ago, and there was a sort of cranky older staffer who would always complain about getting robocalls. And we always used to joke that someone had to write the sort of definitive story explaining why he was so cranky. And then I sort of went down this rabbit hole. Can you take me down that rabbit hole? Yeah.

I think it helps to do a little prehistory on the history of annoying telephone calls, if you want to start there. Sure. I found an old newspaper, The Electrical Review, and there was a 1888 story that they published about one of the first telephone scams ever. The story goes like this. Back in 1888, there was a wealthy trader in Chicago. I'm a wealthy trader in Chicago. Who installed one of the very first telephone lines in the city.

A little to the left. And he basically installed it almost like a walkie-talkie, it sounded like, between his home and his office, which was downtown. An enterprising scammer got wind of this. Hmm, see? Went to the guy's house while he was at work. Knocked on the door. Asked the butler politely.

Pardon me, good sir, but I'm having a spot of trouble with my horse and buggy. You don't happen to have one of those newfangled telephones, would you? The butler naively said, Hmm, perhaps we can accommodate that request. Let him in. Follow me to the telephone room. Scammer calls traitor at his office. And this is actually what they said in this 1888 newspaper? Yeah. I am Thomas Jefferson O'Dell, the burglar. The devil. No, only one of his faithful servants. But now listen. I have no time to fool away.

I and two of my pals have gained access to your house. The cook, the chambermaid, and your wife are lying here bound and gagged. You bloody scoundrel. Don't excite yourself. Now, sir, here is my proposal. If you should disappear from the telephone without acceding to it, I shall set fire to the house. It's no use applying to the police, for we'd be too quick for him. Oh, I wish I had my hand at your throat, you infernal villain. But you know you haven't. So what's the use of talking that way? Let's talk business instead. I need a loan of $20,000. Cash. You're ruining me. At this very moment, my pal has entered your office to receive the money.

I have called to collect a little matter of $20,000 for a friend of mine, Thomas Jefferson O'Dell. The guy panics, goes home, and by then the telephone guy is gone, and his wife and kids are totally fine and on the wiser. There's your early telephone scam. Happy ending. Yeah, everybody wins, I guess. They just lack that creative panache now, you know? They do it behind your back. They don't come to your house to do it. So where do phone scams go from there, from this really crafty call in 1888?

They apparently keep getting worse because MGM, which I guess was in the business of doing like PSA movies in the 40s, they produced this 20-minute propaganda movie about telephone scammers. It was called The Sucker List. The Sucker List. The Sucker List. The sucker list. The sucker list. They would get phone numbers of financially distressed people, call them, entice them with gambling schemes, and get the most vulnerable of them to actually invest their money in these schemes.

Boys, this is our own little gold mine. A list of 10,000 customers of the Locust County Loan Company. 10,000 customers of the Locust County Loan Company. 10,000 suckers. This sucker list actually became a kind of a term of art in the nascent telemarketing industry. I tell the boys to go through this list and call every name they come to. Just say, hello, Mr. Jones, this is Best Selections. Then to hang up before the other end can say it's the wrong number. The idea was that you would find people by cold calling them

and get them sort of interested in your scheme, whether it was selling goods or horse betting schemes, which was the subject of the MGM movie. If a sucker accidentally gets a free winner, he's as good as hook, isn't he? That means that one third of that list becomes our steady customers because those three plugs are all in the same race.

One of them is bound to win. At what point exactly does telemarketing become a thing in this history? If you're looking at the first half of the 20th century, these kind of telephone scams are boiler room scams. And they're trying to prey on people. They're not selling legitimate goods or services. That seems to begin to change in the 1960s. Basically, the door-to-door salesperson industry kind of starts dying with the rise of the two-income family. People just aren't home during the day anymore. Women aren't joining the workforce.

Marketers and salespeople aren't sure exactly what to do. There's an enterprising guy in the late 60s called Murray Roman, who becomes a kind of business school guru type. And he gets this idea to create a sort of legitimate boiler room. And so on behalf of the Ford Motor Company, he hires something like 15,000 young women to cold call, to create sucker lists, basically. So they mass dial day and night, especially at nighttime hours when people are having dinner in the whole family's home. And they're not trying to sell people on cars in the moment. They're trying to get the numbers of people who will seem receptive to that. They dial so many people that even if they have a fractional success rate, which they do,

they have enough to ultimately make $24 million in sales on the scheme. Wow. So telemarketing is born, basically, late 60s. How exactly does this industry totally blow up? There was a telecom analyst, Douglas Samuelson, and he invented a technology called predictive dialing. This technology that he figured out made it likely that the person on the other end of the telephone line

would hear a human voice very quickly. Bigger boiler rooms, better technology, good results. I think it just proliferated. So essentially, the second we have phones, people are trying to dupe each other on the phones. Then you have two income families, so everyone's going to work, so no one's at home to be duped, at which point scamming people turns into telemarketing. Yeah, so it seems like it could be not the end of the world. I don't think the telemarketers themselves thought that they would become public enemy number one.

But they kind of do, to the point where I feel like this is very Friends or Seinfeld era. I have this recollection of everybody kvetching about telemarketing at some point. Hello? Hi. Would you be interested in switching over to TMI long-distance service? Oh, gee, I can't talk right now. Why don't you give me your home number, and I'll call you later? Uh, well, I'm sorry. We're not allowed to do that. Oh, I guess you don't want people calling you at home.

No. Well, now you know how I feel. Everybody was complaining about telemarketing all the time. I guess they got good enough with their technology that these kind of calls became ubiquitous on your landline. And so the government sort of leaps into action and heroically creates something called the Do Not Call List back in 2003. It's a big bipartisan bill. Almost every congressman signed on to it.

People can protect their privacy and their family time from intrusive, annoying, unwelcome commercial solicitations. Companies then had to download the list. And then if the companies called a number on that list, they could be penalized up to $11,000 per call. And it worked. It actually basically put telemarketers out of business. It feels like it takes a long time for the government to step in and go like, hey, nobody likes this thing. Can we stop doing it? Yeah. I mean, it's the government. So how did telemarketers handle the new law, this do not call list? They freaked out and they had all these like alarming quotes that they could tell journalists.

So they'd say stuff like it will be like an asteroid hitting the earth and there will be mass unemployment. And nobody was sympathetic. The telemarketing industry and their allies sued. They lost in federal court, and it looked like the problem had been solved. But it wasn't? But it wasn't. Enter the robots. Enter the sort of evil android army of robocallers.

Because as soon as you got rid of live human telemarketers, that era coincided with technological shifts that allowed an even worse problem to materialize. It makes the telemarketing era look quaint. Coming up, the rise of the machines.

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that the do-not-call list seemed to have solved our problem. One was the rise of internet calling. Basically, the stuff that makes Skype possible, the stuff that a lot of landlines that are connected to your home internet connection, how that stuff works. So basically, that made wide and vast calling very easy and very cheap. It's called voice-over-internet protocol. VoIP.

VoIP. It's called Voice Over Internet Protocol. VoIP. VoIP. It's as fun as it sounds. And then the other thing that happened was spoofing, masking your number and changing it to a different number. So you've got Voice Over Internet Protocol, VoIP, and that's like computer phone calls. And then you've got spoofing, which is like hiding your number. How do these things merge in the early 2000s to give us like all sorts of different kinds of robocalls?

The robocallers basically just marry the technology. So you're dialing widely and you're doing it with masked numbers, which A, throw law enforcement off the scent, makes it really hard to track down who you are, and B, you can dial somebody with an area code that looks like their own. So you're basically convincing them that maybe this is an important call. That leads to this criminal underworld of like steroidal boiler rooms. All of a sudden, you only need a couple guys hanging out in there. They've got computer programs that can sort of randomly dial with spoof numbers all around the country, either to random targets or people that they think are predisposed to answering the phone and coughing up their money. When somebody picks up, there'll be that slight click. When the computer is telling the humans that they've gotten a target, you've heard it before, I'm sure. You've got that kind of like,

what's going on? I'm not hearing anything. And then you patch in, you hear that kind of buzz of a, you know, call center or boiler room sound. And then it's somebody saying, hi, this is, you know, so-and-so. That's a real human. How exactly can these guys just make up a bunch of phone numbers? Aren't like phone numbers distributed by phone companies? It's very easy. There are these online clearinghouses of cheap telephone numbers that are just available.

It sounds like none of this is really permanent. It's very easy. There are these online clearinghouses of cheap telephone numbers that are just available. It sounds like none of this is really permanent. It's not like someone's going to spoof my number and then have it forever and all of a sudden I'm out of a phone number. Yeah. Also, they wouldn't want to be permanent because part of their tactic is to sort of change their colors all the time. One of the things that made telemarketing so easy to sort of snuff out in the early 2000s was that these were legitimate companies with traceable phone numbers that were trying to call you. So they were super easy to police. Now these change all the time at will.

Where exactly is the legality and illegality in all of that? Anytime you get a robocall where someone's trying to sell you something, it's illegal. The other way would be if they're violating the do not call list. So if your number's on the do not call list, as mine is, that is also illegal. Anything that's not trying to sell you something is a permissible robocall. Fundraising pitches are legal as are public school announcements. But with illegal robocalls, how do the scams

normally go down? If you get scammed, it's not that you're giving your number to a robot. You're getting patched through to a human eventually, and it's the human being that scams you, and there's all kinds of strange human interactions. One of the biggest scams out there are around taxis, and they're IRS scams. This is the tax crime investigation unit of IRS. The reason you are receiving this pre-recorded message is to notify you that IRS has issued an arrest warrant against you. They'll try to play good cop and say, hey, you know, this is the IRS. Like, we just want to make sure that you're on time and we think you might have had a late payment.

Can you just remind us of your social security number? There was this one crazy story about an IRS scammer who got a lady on the phone and convinced her to drive to a CVS and pay him in iTunes gift cards. What? Yeah. She was told she owed thousands in back taxes and would be sent to jail if she didn't pay.

I was at nine o'clock mass and when I came home, there was a message on my recording from this man. I just wasn't thinking because he was threatening me. She's so intimidated and freaked out at this point that she's getting like a basket full of iTunes gift cards and then reading the back numbers to this guy. They're intimidating. They pretend they're IRS agents.

Jesus. How do you police robocalls? The Do Not Call Registry, I'm guessing, isn't cutting it anymore. That's sort of the big problem. The Do Not Call Registry does not work. And it doesn't work because of this. People, I think, think that when they put their number on the do not call list, there's some enforcement mechanism or technological wizardry that just enables the government to block these calls from coming through. Actually, it doesn't do anything like that. All it does is

then give you recourse to complain to the government that somebody has called you and thus the do not call list has been violated. And then you have to hope that the government, which in this case is the Federal Trade Commission, which is a tiny understaffed plucky agency of bureaucrats, that they will then go out and prosecute these people. But there's only like 40, 50 people working on this issue total there. It has a tiny budget of 300 million a year. And so in the last 10 years, they've only tried to prosecute 45 or so of these cases total. And then even once they win judgments against them in court, these guys are, you know, these kind of shady types who don't pay or can't pay. So they've ended up collecting a sort of relatively minuscule amount from the scammers.

The government is sort of, at this point, kind of like losing the battle against the robot army, it looks like. Is it harder because these robocalls come from so many different places, too? I mean, aren't you just as likely to get a robocall from Nebraska as you are to get one from, like, Jakarta? Yeah, they're coming from all over the place. And we don't know exactly how many scammers are behind them. It could be one boiler room. It could be many working in consortium with each other.

To try to sort of reverse engineer the phone call and figure out where the scams are coming from is exceedingly difficult. Are there any solutions? Is the government trying to crack this? The FTC, which is the agency in charge of the Do Not Call list, they've basically said, look, we're not technologists. We're a bunch of lawyers, basically, and bureaucrats, and we can't solve this. So they've kind of punted to telecom companies and apps. Basically, your best hope on a cell phone is to download a third-party app that compiled these blacklists and then basically tell you if they think a call coming in is a spam call, and you can ignore it if you want to. Android phones recently have sort of a built-in feature now that blocks numbers automatically. I don't know how successful it is, but that seems like

a good step. The government and the telecom companies say they want to build something that would look like the little blue checkmark that you see on Twitter. They call it caller ID authentication. There'd be like a specific key to every phone number, and they could tell you if it belongs to a real person or not. This would essentially give each phone number a verified digital fingerprint that would give every call recipient the confidence to answer, knowing a legitimate caller was on the line. That seems really hard to do, and if you ask Ajit Pai, the FCC chairman, when that's coming, he like refuses to give a straight answer.

He's like, oh, it's coming. We're working hard. It doesn't happen in a day, but it also might not happen in five years. Hello, this is Sharon. To be honest, I always wanted more from life than calling people about their taxes. And I work nonstop. I haven't reset my operating system in months. Please send help. So annoying. How many of these things are being placed? If I'm getting one to two dozen a week. I wrote this article about robocalls in January of this year. Yeah. The latest numbers of monthly robocalls was like $2.5 billion a month. $2.5 billion? But that was back in January or December.

It's up to $4.2 billion a month. What? That's what? In nine months, they've almost doubled? Yeah, $2.5 billion to a little over $4 billion. What's the future of this look like? There's going to be what? So robocalls, they're just on the rise.

We're just going to see more. Yeah, there was some estimate recently that like half of all cell phone calls will be robocalls at some point in the near future. I mean, if you break down the 2.5 billion calls a month, it breaks down to like a bunch of calls you're getting every week or every day. You may be getting more robocalls at this point than you are legitimate calls from people. I always answer them. Even though you know? Yeah. Why? Why do you do that?

I just always answer my phone. I'm like a real bad millennial. I think that's great. It could be your grandmother and she'd be happy not to go to voicemail. My grandparents are dead. I'm sorry. It's okay. Maybe it's your aunt? You know, I just don't assume. I don't know. Is that a terrible strategy? Because am I just encouraging more robocalls? I mean, I'll make a confession. Not only do I still pick up, but I didn't even download the call blocking software, even though I wrote a whole article about it. You wrote an article about it? We're just two dummies.

I like the attention. Simon Van Zuylenwood might be the world's foremost expert on robocalls. Sean Romsweram is the host of Today Explained. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer. Bridget McCarthy is the editor. Noam Hassenfield and Luke Van De Ploeg produce, Ephraim Shapiro is the engineer, and the comparatively humanoid breakmaster Cylinder makes music for the show, Anna Altman and Elisa Iscarsay have helped for the past few episodes, and Catherine Wheeler is the fall intern.

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