Finance

Fake Auto Warranty Scam Callers Face Possible $10M Fine, But I’d Prefer The Death Penalty

Only sort of kidding here....

By  
on

GuillotineRegardless of who you are, what you do for a living, or where you grew up, you have faced this problem. Maybe it interrupted you right in the middle of a call with a loved one. Perhaps it struck while you were innocently playing a crossword-style smartphone game during an extended visit to the toilet during a workday. If you’re like me, it’s even been an unwelcome interjection into a courtroom Zoom session.

Yes, I’m talking about those stupid spam telephone calls that inconvenience each one of us multiple times every single day. Usually, I try to ignore calls from numbers I don’t recognize. But even stopping to see if the call is from someone you know three or four times a day is a huge annoyance. Sometimes they even have the audacity to leave robotic voice messages.

It’s a scourge. I’ve often contemplated whether a politician could run on a nonpartisan single-issue platform of simply getting rid of automatically dialed spam calls. I know that would tangibly and noticeably improve my life, and anyone who could do it would probably earn my vote. Plus, we’d save the $40 billion or so that researchers tell us scam calls cost the economy every year in the United States.

Although they haven’t gotten rid of the problem completely yet — I actually received a scam call the very moment I sat down to write this column — apparently the Ohio Attorney General and the Federal Communications Commission have just taken a big step toward reducing robocalls. Just three people may have largely been behind those fake auto warranty scam calls, which, up until these enforcement actions lifted off, were the most common type of scam calls.

Aaron Michael Jones, Roy Melvin Cox, Jr., and Stacey E. Yim (who is the domestic partner of Jones) have all been civilly sued by the Ohio Attorney General for allegedly being the ringleaders of a massive auto-dialing scheme aimed at selling fake auto warranties to rubes by peppering everyone everywhere with millions of daily calls. A number of other entities and individuals have been sued as participants in the fraud, and just one of them, in just one dialing campaign, initiated over 1.7 billion outbound calls to 470 million unique telephone numbers from July 2018 through December 2019, according to the complaint. In case you aren’t up on your national demographics, the current U.S. population is about 330 million.

You know how the scam goes. You accidentally pick up because you’re expecting test results from your dermatologist or whatever, a robotic voice tells you your vehicle warranty has expired (I don’t think so, Skynet, I still have 10,000 miles left on that extended warranty I got for my Chevy Sonic back in 2012), and you hang up and try to move on with your day. And then you probably get a couple more identical calls later on that evening.

Of course, when they’re calling billions of times, even a tiny, miniscule portion of people who are alarmed rather than annoyed make it worthwhile. For those unlucky few who stay on the line, the next step is being pitched a vehicle service contract (which is definitely not a warranty) that they don’t need but are afraid they’ll be in trouble without.

Sponsored

The Ohio Attorney General is asking for about $10 million in fines. I don’t know if that will be enough. Cox was sued by the Federal Trade Commission in 2011 for doing basically the same thing back then, and apparently didn’t learn his lesson. Jones has been sued thrice previously for illegal robocalling, twice by the FTC and once by Texas.

With the filing of this lawsuit, and after the FCC sent out a series of cease-and-desist letters and forced telecom companies to stop carrying the robocalls from several known scammers (including those sued by the Ohio AG), the volume of fake vehicle warranty calls supposedly fell by about 80 percent from June to late July. That’s a good start. But even the enforcement authorities expect this to continue to be a game of Whac-A-Mole.

I have an alternative proposal: what if instead of fining these people for probably less than they made from their scheme so they can just go repeat it again, how about after affording them full due process and proving them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and all, we just execute them? Guillotines, I’m thinking.

I’m only sort of kidding. If you think of the reason that murder is wrong as depriving the victim of experiencing more of their life or of depriving the victim’s loved ones of further time with them, then these robocall scammers have stolen way more lifetimes of experiences and time with loved ones than your average murderer sitting on death row. One study said there were as many as 100 billion scam robocalls that have gone out so far this year as of August. If each one of those 100 billion junk calls took up just one second of someone’s life, that’s 3,171 years of life stolen from people (and that’s to say nothing of the actual money that gets taken).

If a stranger showed up and knocked at your door every night trying to sell you a fake auto warranty by lying to you, you’d probably be filing for a harassment restraining order by about the third time. By about the tenth time, that person would be arrested. And these robocall people aren’t knocking on your door from outside, they’re buzzing you inside your own pants. And it’s not just you, they’re targeting everyone, everywhere, all the time, sucking away a bristlecone pine’s lifetime-worth of human joy every few months.

Sponsored

So yeah. Even though I’m generally against the death penalty, for auto-dialing scammers, I think we really need to consider it.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

Topics

, , ,