OPINION - EDITORIAL

Oh, oh, telephone line

Blue days, black nights, doo wah, doo lang

It's enough to drive us crazy. Or crazier. No, not reporters spelling "alot" as one word. It's these constant, unwanted, unsolicited cellphone calls.

How many come each day? Two? Three? On those (rare) days when we only get one unsolicited cellphone call, we check the charge on the forsaken device, just to make sure it's working in case of emergency.

O, Mencken, thou should be living at this hour. That brilliant curmudgeon thought the telephone was an awful invention. He hated it. As with most things, he was prescient.

Now comes a report in The Washington Post. And we had to read the headline a couple of times before we quite grasped it. The lowdown, and we mean low: By next year, nearly half of all cellphone calls will be scams.

Get ready for it: Hello, this is the last attempt to contact you about your credit card. Hello, your student loan is in default, please call. Hello, your bank account might have been hacked.

As with most things, this story has an Arkansas connection. The Post quoted some folks at an Arkansas-based company called First Orion, which provides its clients with caller ID and blocking technology. Scott Ballantyne is the chief of marketing at First Orion, with an office just down the street from Democrat-Gazette headquarters in Little Rock. He tells us his company monitors hundreds of millions of calls.

"We have for years. We see movement in what we know are legitimate scam calls."

The practice of sending a call to your phone, with a local area code, is called "neighborhood spoofing." Scott Ballantyne says it's gone from 3 to 4 percent of all calls last year to 29.2 percent. "With what we can see, we are projecting that will be close to 45 percent six months from now."

And it's not just one group of bad guys. It's a lot of groups of bad guys.

"This is predominantly organized crime," Mr. Ballantyne said. "This is a multi-billion industry . . . . And they're getting very sophisticated. Like anybody who has a criminal enterprise, you change tactics to keep the criminal enterprise [profitable]."

He says the big mobile phone companies are trying to do something about it too from their end. Because if half your phone calls are from scammers, you might stop using your phone. That would hurt those companies the most.

The papers say scammers are targeting immigrants these days. Why, of course. Predators target those who might be weakest. Apparently these low-lifes have been calling cellphones in large cities with large Chinese populations, telling them to give up their credit card numbers to "the Chinese embassy." Or turn over information to get around a legal loophole. The Federal Trade Commission is on the case.

Mr. Ballantyne tells us that the scammers keep changing strategies, and folks will have to change with them. Just as in the recent past when your IT help would put anti-virus software on your computer, only to have to update it a few months later. These days, scammers can make cellphones and numbers and ID screens mimic assistance centers from charities. Or even the IRS.

The Federal Communications Commission says that more than half of all complaints it gets are about unwanted calls. How many are we talking about? About 2.4 billion unwanted calls. Each. Month. According to government estimates.

Sure, it's against the law for these scammers to call folks who fill out the do-not-call registry. But, what, them worry? They're already breaking the fraud laws, so they don't appear to care too much about the do-not-call laws. Proof: 2.4 billion. Each. Month.

Remember, semper vigilans. Always watchful, always vigilant.

We'd like to punish these folks, but good. Like calling them at home. During dinner.

Editorial on 09/24/2018

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