Robocall King Meets the FCC, Part 1
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The average American is on the receiving end of more than 150 robocalls a year. Some robocalls, which are automated telephone calls placed by a computerized auto dialer, have legitimate purposes. Unfortunately, many of these calls are used to pester or scam consumers. In June 2019 alone Americans received 4.35 billion robocalls, with scams and telemarketing making up over 50 percent. Curious about the barrage of robocalls he himself receives, journalist Alex Palmer decides to look into how robocalls work and why they've become so popular. He finds that advances in technology and the low cost of placing robocalls—as little as 4 cents per dial—have made this nuisance a popular marketing tool for scammers. After digging deeper into the trend, Alex discovers the case of a set of illegal robocalls that temporarily stalled a Virginia-based paging provider, disrupting the ability of hospitals to get in touch with emergency services personnel. As a result, local doctors, nurses, EMTs and firefighters were at risk of missing critical pages. Due to the resulting public safety hazard, the Federal Communications Commission made tracking down the source of these robocalls a top priority. Meanwhile, travel-review website TripAdvisor is being inundated with complaints from customers that it is soliciting them through robocalls to use its travel rewards program. But TripAdvisor isn't making the calls and doesn't have a rewards program. With its reputation at stake, TripAdvisor puts its top fraud experts on the case. The FCC and the travel site will eventually learn that they are on the hunt for the same man, Adrian Abramovich.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on AARP the perfect scam. |
| 0:02.6 | There are very few things that in America that everyone can align on but I think one is we all hate robocalls every one of us |
| 0:16.0 | Welcome back to AARP, the perfect scam. I'm your host Will Johnson joined as always by AARP's Fraud Watch Network Ambassador |
| 0:20.4 | Frank Abagnale. |
| 0:21.8 | Great to have you back on again. Great to be back. So Frank I'm talking |
| 0:24.3 | about robocalls, the illegal ones. We all get them and they seem to come in waves. Sometimes you hear |
| 0:29.4 | about them in the news and I feel like I'll get you know a week will go by where I don't get any and then I'll have a few days where a bunch are coming in and then I'll hear something in the news like robo-calls are on an upswing. |
| 0:40.4 | Yeah, absolutely, because people have probably read within the last few months that they say now that 50% |
| 0:46.1 | of all robocalls are scams, and it's probably more than that. |
| 0:51.0 | You know, I've been doing this for 43 years lecturing about scams writing books about |
| 0:55.5 | scams articles about scams and what I've noticed you know when I started talking |
| 1:00.5 | about scams 40-plus years, scams were committed by writing letters. |
| 1:05.1 | So there was a Nigerian letter, they sent out thousands of letters, the stamps on the letters |
| 1:10.0 | were counterfeit, so it didn't really cost them anything to send the letters. |
| 1:13.8 | But you know they could only send so many letters, 10,000 letters, 25,000 letters. |
| 1:18.4 | But they were only looking for 0.1% of response. |
| 1:22.1 | If someone responded, they were going to make a lot of money. |
| 1:25.2 | Then we got into emails, and we all got spam and all these emails coming over |
| 1:29.4 | with all these scams from Nigeria. |
| 1:31.8 | But they could reach now millions of people by sending out emails, |
| 1:35.2 | and again, only looking for that 0.1% to respond. |
| 1:40.0 | And then, of course, they moved into Robocalls, because Robocalls became a new technology they had access to and they could make not millions, but billions of Robocalls annually. |
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