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I spend a fair amount of time every month speaking to telemarketers, whether I want to or not. About half of the time I try to come up with some clever way to have fun with them, as long as they are human… robocalls are the worst. Sometimes I will sing a song for them, or try on a new accent, but usually I just try to respond with a ridiculous situation or stipulation for signing up with whatever they got. If they are peddling mortgage financing… I will tell them that I want to buy my own island and it costs 500 million dollars and I will not refinance my home unless they give me at least 500 million.

I probably even spend more time each week deleting e-mails from obvious scam spammers… but I very rarely will respond to them, thinking that there is some software out there that just randomly generates stories about being a South African prince who wants to invest his inheritance in America and stumbled accross my e-mail address and thought i was an honest sounding Americano.

So when I heard this story on NPR about a subculture of rebels that fight back against the onslaught, my kindred spirit was peeked. I checked out a website of one group that collects “trophies” by making the scammers do ridiculous things and then take a picture of it.

http://419eater.com

It is pretty funny stuff… and then its just sad. All of these people look so desperate. What a terrible way to spend your life. Many of them are young too… people casting aside all the good that could come of the efforts of youthful activity and settling for the life of a spammer… just hoping that a few will catch and they can extract a few US dollars from some strangers through the internet.

The Scam Baiters try to turn the tables on the would be victimizers by absorbing as much of their time and energy as possible and roping them into months of negotiations… only to end in the disappointment of nothingness, or being made a fool of. I used to take this tactic with telemarketers… leave the phone out on the table and watch TV while saying yes and uhhuh just to keep the conversation going… I think I lasted about an hour once… got to the end and then said,

wait a minute… aluminum siding… you are trying to sell me aluminum siding… I live in an apartment… this is not going to work, I am sorry

I wasn’t sorry then, but later on I realized that I had violated my own humanity and even my responsibility to love others in an attempt to rightfully punish the source of annoyance. There has to be a better way. What if, by a small donation of your time and effort you could encourage someone… or remind someone that they were still human, even if they are making phone calls they don’t want to trying to sell stuff they don’t care about to people that hate them.

There has to be a better approach than humiliation, there is something insipid in the process of it alone… revenge and spite… it brings out the worst in people.

A few times my antics broke down the hardened telemarketer on the other end… and they just laughed at me and enjoyed it.  Once I even had someone call back and thank me… that’s victory.

What if we could take all the random efforts of scammers and channel it towards something useful… what a waste of diligence and persistence… they deserve better.

Categories: Technology