Another thought on this, coming from someone whose phone number has ended up on some large number of scammer lists, to the point where I would have about 1000 scam calls per month around open enrollment time (think targeting seniors):
You are advocating for feeding the troll. The troll will not be satisfied with table scraps. Larger trolls will see the opportunity and scale up.
I get what you’re saying. I don’t have a solution to the inequality you point out. But rewarding the bad behavior doesn’t help rectify the inequality, it just makes more bad behavior.
Does that make sense from a behavioral-economic perspective? What is the scammer’s incentive to filter certain people out? Wouldn’t it be better to move more people down the “funnel” and filter potential troublemakers as they appear?
Is making a scammer less-productive, so possibly saving some number of vulnerable people from losing their ability to support themselves in retirement, ethical if that scammer may (may!) not themselves benefiting from the scam, and may be beaten or otherwise punished for poor performance?
... my god, might we even have a moral obligation to help them make their numbers?
This. I used to have long commutes. I really enjoyed getting scam calls during the commutes and seeing how long I could keep them on. It was completely a game. I look at it that the longer I can occupy them the less time they have to take advantage of someone else.
These people are the lowest of the low, they prey on the senile and ignorant, stealing from them regardless of their economic status. There should be no pity. If I can end the conversation making the scammer regret their life decisions, or at least waste their time, it's a win.
Sounds like the solutions needs to be orders of magnitude larger fines than the amount that would be gained. If each individual user is only losing $1-3, they won't or can't fight it, and the company also won't in many cases. If the minimum payout/fine for such a scam was, say, $100 per occurrence and that was written into all the contracts, there'd be enough incentive at every stage for companies to clean up their act.
The market may solve this problem, by punishing companies who pull egregious bait-and-switch scams. It doesn't need to be impossible to try to scam customers, just economically irrational.
While it’s entertaining, it’s just a bit sad that people continue to fall for these scams. The one woman who believed the Amazon refund scam sounded young, maybe in her 40s.
While the idea of wasting the call center operators time appears noble. After watching a few of these scam baiter videos, it appears the call centers are staffed with at least a few dozen people. If one dumb operator stays on the line for 8+ hrs with a scam baiter while the other operators are taking calls from real potential victims. The impact seems limited.
Also, some people will say that it’s educational. But if you look at the target audience of the scammers, it’s mostly the elderly and/or those with dementia or some other progressive mental illness. The education won’t help this vulnerable population.
How do we stop the root of the issue? How do we make it so that scamming the elderly and vulnerable population is not profitable?
They are most likely young adults who while probably know they are doing something wrong don’t know the significant impact on the people they end up causing.
Yes, very likely poor, desperate and also under duress by their “managers” to meet their quotas. It doesn’t absolve them of their sins though. The system might even be gamified for these callers and they lose sense of their own morality at some point if they have any.
This scam has been going for so long yet the authorities don’t seem to be doing enough either in US or here in India. I wish someone powerful enough takes this scam head-on and uproot the whole system. It really preys upon one of the most vulnerable members of our society and we should collectively do something about it.
My whole point has been regarding #1. There is some probability that the scammers get "a bad shuffle" and get abused. However, if you deliberately waste their time, you have just increased that probability to 100%. I'm claiming that makes things worse.
If your new question is how do we solve the human trafficking problem that undergirds this industry, I'm afraid I don't think there's "this one hack" that can solve that. But at least we don't have to make things worse in the short term.
Intentionally creating inhibitive costs for the sole purpose of preventing bad actors is playing a game of whack a mole.
It only temporarily solves the problem and ruins it for the rest of the customers. There are other ways to address scammers that do not involve making the entire market more expensive for expensive's sake.
I agree, which is why I would prioritize the other fixes as well. Still, these kinds of things (once broadly learned by the community) can have a significant impact.
Yes, it won't be 100%, but it would reduce the conversion rate of the scammers. That's ultimately the solution. No single measure will ever fix this, and if you wait to implement something until you will solve the entire problem space you'll never get started.
The solution is a hundred different changes that each reduce the scammers' conversion rate by 1-2%.
But at what level do we accept there's assholes and move on and not let them ruin it for all of us?
If we have a program that helps 1 person and 1 person scams it, we might get rid of that program. What if it helps 10 for every 1 scammer? 1,000? 1,000,000? Certainly with the last we'd say it's ok.
Sounds like a good incentive to start services to actually help protect those most vulnerable to scams - my own mother could have benefited from something similar as one of her caretakers bilked her out of a few thousand dollars toward the end of her life.
A 'fool them once, shame on you... but it won't happen again!' policy would be a welcome thing.
I have to wonder if, in macro economic terms, we'd be better off spending whatever is necessary to successfully investigate and prosecute scammers/telemarketers/ransomers.
Pro: few people are likely to get scammed out of life-damaging amounts of money.
Con: might lead to a system where some scammers are skimming small amounts from large numbers of people, but not causing enough pain to do something about it.
well sure, if we cant do it we cant, however, I would say this is a problem that too can be solved. But it is also a question of WANT, and the one i replied to suggested we should specially punish those who scam elderly etc, and I would suggest we simply raise the level of punishment for ALL scammers
You are advocating for feeding the troll. The troll will not be satisfied with table scraps. Larger trolls will see the opportunity and scale up.
I get what you’re saying. I don’t have a solution to the inequality you point out. But rewarding the bad behavior doesn’t help rectify the inequality, it just makes more bad behavior.
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