Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, December 11, 2020

A puzzling phenomenon

For well over a year now -- maybe two years -- I've been getting three or four robocalls on my cell phone every day, from the Ronald T. Dump for president campaign up until November 4, and now from the Committee to Establish a Fascist Dictatorship. Obviously I never answer these calls and they go to my voicemail, where I am forced to erase them. About half the time the voice is the harsh, grating, overloud spew of the Great Pumpkin itself, the other half someone speaking for it.

 

These come from various spoofed numbers, the vast majority from area codes where I don't know anybody, although occasionally they spoof a local number. This means it doesn't do any good to block the numbers, they never use the same number twice. 

 

Given the consistent results after literally a couple of thousand tries, presumably they know they are never going to get money from me and that all that's happening is that they are annoying someone. So why is this happening? My best guess is that the Orange Excrescence is getting scammed. The organization is paying someone to make these robocalls, and they're getting paid by the call, not by any results. So if they know there's a paid-up phone line somewhere in the U.S., they'll keep calling it and hand in the stats on the number of calls they're making. Does anybody have a better idea?

Common sense: Whoever is doing this is not trying to scam me, or they would have realized I'm not a mark after five or so calls and given up. Could it be, as a commenter suggests, mere ineptitude? I don't think so -- these people are trying to make money somehow.

1 comment:

Raymond said...

Your mistake is in assuming that anyone is keeping track, or could be incentivized to do so. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.