Skip to content

I Get a Robocall While Making a Video About Robocalls

2019-03-01 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: US politics & society · mode: News analysis · tags: timely hook

Visiting his in-laws in Florida, whose landline mostly rings with scammers, Hank explains the FTC's forecast that fraudulent calls will soon outnumber real ones, finds that robocalls persist because scammers hide well and the phone system was never built for them, and says the societal cost is lost faith in the world, so he will try to be nice when he talks to people.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Reply to John's despair: the FTC predicts more fraudulent mobile calls than real ones in 2019

  • ★★★ Hank says the FTC predicts that sometime in 2019 more US mobile phone calls will attempt to defraud people than not: more robocalls than calls. — 00:00:00 · United States
  • ★★ Hank is visiting his in-laws in Florida, has had five slices of key lime pie in five days, and finds their landline both inefficient and kind of adorable. (playful) — 00:00:00 · Florida

00:00:29 — His in-laws' Florida landline and the scam calls his mother-in-law gets

  • ★★ Hank says his in-laws' phone gets maybe seven calls a day, three or four of them from people trying to steal their money. (hedged) — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank lists scams his mother-in-law has heard: the IRS will arrest you, a grandson arrested in Africa needs bail, free CDs from a radio station, an inheritance, and a $50 software package supposedly needed because Microsoft is updating Windows. — 00:00:58

00:01:27 — Scams target the elderly; a robocall arrives mid-video; fraud statistics; why it isn't fixed

  • ★★ Hank says such scams somewhat target the elderly, because they tend to have retirement money and are on average a little less likely to have kept up on how things work. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ While filming, Hank gets a robocall and tells it he is making a video right now. (playful) — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Hank says 3% of mobile phone calls came from fraudulent sources in 2017, rising to 30% in 2018. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Hank says the FTC estimates a scammer gets about $400 per successful fraud and that over a billion dollars has been stolen in total. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ About a year ago Hank tweeted that any legislator who wants to get elected should do something about robocalls, since everyone agrees it should be fixed. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Hank assumed robocalls went unfixed because of money in politics, evil telecoms or Washington's incapability, but finds scammers are good at hiding from the law and technology lets them. — 00:02:11
  • ★★ Hank says telecom companies may be able to do something about part of the problem if they worked harder on it. (hedged) — 00:02:11

00:02:40 — Why it is complicated, the societal cost of lost faith, and his resolve to be nice to people

  • ★★ Hank says it is complicated: technologies not meant to integrate are integrating, people are sometimes bad, and we didn't understand the significance we put into the phone number. — 00:02:40
  • ★★★ Hank says that for many people most of the world's contacts in a day are attempts to steal their money, a big societal cost and one more way people have lost faith in the world. — 00:03:09
  • ★★ Hank says this is likely all due to just a few hundred or maybe a thousand scammers operating in the US. (hedged) — 00:03:09 · United States
  • ★★★ Hank, a pretty optimistic and pro-human person, is not that optimistic when 1,000 people out of 300 million are allowed to ruin something by being bad and making money at it. — 00:03:38
  • ★★ Since a lot of people talk to scammers more than to people, Hank says that when he gets the chance to talk to people he will do his best to be nice to them. — 00:03:38

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says anyone who calls you while your name is on the Do Not Call list is breaking the law, but there is no good way to find them. — video description
  • ★★ The description says good security wasn't built into the telecom system because, before computers, scammers calling thousands of people per minute was unimaginable. — video description
  • ★★ Hank says telecommunications law has had to change a lot to combat robocalls, and it could have happened faster if telecom companies and the government weren't resistant to change, but it is also a hard problem to solve. — video description
  • ★★ Hank says the phone system works so well that setting up a robocalling scam isn't hard, which is why a thousand or so people have done it, and if only 1,000 people out of 300 million are needed to ruin something for money, they will. — video description
  • ★ Hank lists the articles he read: a long Washington Post piece with good background, an older but still relevant NPR story, a Consumer Reports piece on what phone companies can do but aren't, and a MarketWatch article with tips on stopping robocalls. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: robocall

Also: Organizations: Federal Trade Commission · Internal Revenue Service · Microsoft

Concepts: internet service provider

Places: Africa · Florida · United States · Washington, DC

Products: Microsoft Windows

Only in the description or credits: Consumer Reports · MarketWatch · National Do Not Call Registry · NPR · The Washington Post

Replies to

← Previous: The Necessity to Struggle / The Futility of Effort · Next → Way, Way Down the Rabbit Hole