Wait, Who Answers The Phone?
Everyone is dunking on the lady who got called by “Amazon” customer support and ended up putting a shoebox with 50 grand in it in the back seat of a car, and rightly so! But there’s been a spate of “I got scammed and you can too” articles recently, and lots of “you don’t know what might happen to you in the right/wrong situation”.
But here’s the thing, they all start the same way: the person being scammed answered their phone. Not to be indelicate, but who in the fuck does that anymore? No one, and I mean no one does legitimate business over the phone anymore. If someone has a reason to get a hold of you, you’ll get an email, or a text or something. I haven’t answered the phone from a cold call in ages. Let it go to voicemail, read the transcript, maybe call back if it sounds important. Spoiler: it ain’t important.
Look, the fact that the phone system is entirely populated by robots and scammers is the stupidest possible flavor of this cyberpunk dystopia we’re living in, and we, as a society, should probably do something about it?
But for the moment, here’s a flowchart of what to do if the phone rings and it’s not a person you personally know who you were expecting to call:
- It’s a scam! Don’t answer it!
If it was important, they’d have sent you an email.
One of the running themes on Icecano is “STEM people need more Humanties classes”, but this feels like the opposite? There’s a delightful detail in that article that the caller claimed to be Amazon’s customer service group, and I don’t know how to break this to you, but Amazon doesn’t have anyone who talks on the phone. Not to mention the “government numbers can’t be spoofed” howler, or the “FTC badge number”. It’s like phones have some kind of legitimacy reverse-debt? If nothing else, paying someone to cold-call a customer is expensive. No business is going to do that for anything they won’t have a chance of turning into a sale. Letting you know about fraud? Email at best. They want you to call them. I’m baffled that anyone still picks up when the phone rings.