Ignoring a robocall doesn’t keep some scammers from making money from caller-ID services
Caller ID is feeding one of the very problems it was developed to stop: junk calls.
Illegitimate robocallers, or outfits that flood American landlines with marketing calls, use the decades-old identification system to make money, even when no one picks up.
While scammers’ biggest paydays come from tricking victims into handing over credit card or bank account information, many robocallers make incremental cash along the way, thanks to little-known databases that try to identify who is calling.
Each time a caller’s name is displayed, phone companies pay small fees—typically fractions of pennies—to databases that store such records. Some of these fees are handed back to the caller.
.. “It’s slow nickels, not fast dimes” for scammers, but it helps offset the costs of making the call.. Those landlines are increasingly on the receiving end of robocalls masquerading as telemarketers, the Internal Revenue Service or immigration officials... Scammers purchase a block of unused telephone numbers and submit bogus names and addresses for those numbers to caller-ID databases.They often hire call centers to blast out millions of robocalls, which triggers queries to caller-ID databases. Some databases are run by carriers themselves such as AT&T Inc.,while others are operated by other companies such as Neustar Inc.. The recipient’s carrier pays a small fee for that information request when it delivers a name, typically between $0.0025 and $0.005.. Through its revenue-sharing program, customers can make $2,500 to $5,000 a month per five million queries made to caller ID databases.. A big obstacle, telecommunications lawyers say, is that not all robocalls are illegal. Some are made for legitimate purposes such as doctors appointment reminders or political campaigns.
How “Fox & Friends” Rewrites Trump’s Reality
The thin fourth wall between the President and his TV.
..Once, while riffing about a Scandinavian scientific study, he shared his opinion that “the Swedes have pure genes,” unlike Americans, who “keep marrying other species and other ethnics.”
.. On cable, where the audiences are smaller and more ideologically segmented, morning hosts are free to be more opinionated; on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” for example, Trump is compared to an autocrat, a thug, or worse. “Fox & Friends” mashes these two genres together, resulting in some whiplash-inducing segues. A few minutes of misty-eyed Christmas nostalgia leads immediately—“meanwhile, switching gears”—to a conspiracy theory about Benghazi. A weather report gives way to a warning about the dangers of chain migration, with little adjustment in tone.
.. However, Earhardt noted buoyantly, “Republican candidate Roy Moore has President Trump on his side.” Trump had just recorded a robocall for the Moore campaign.
.. Turning to a person on the ground named Diane, he said, “So, ultimately, a vote for Roy Moore is a vote for President Trump?”
“Correct,” Diane said.
Hegseth ended the segment and then directed viewers back to his colleagues, the pundits in New York City.
Moore lost. The following morning, both “Fox & Friends” and its No. 1 fan were busy rewriting the immediate past. “The President had said that Roy Moore couldn’t win, and, as it turns out, he was right,” Doocy said.
.. Earhardt, speaking “as a female,” summed up her view: “I think this is a referendum on Harvey Weinstein, not on President Trump.” She delivered the line twice more, with slight variations, at the top of each hour. Earhardt is clearly the brainiest of the three co-hosts, if only because she can get through a broadcast without any notable malapropisms or endorsements of eugenics. Still, inevitably, she plays the role of the down-to-earth Southern gal, asking only the softest of softball questions. (Earhardt, to Ivanka Trump, in July of 2016: “Were you a tractor girl, or were you, like me, the pink Barbie Jeep?” Ivanka: “I was that combination.”)
.. Earhardt, speaking “as a female,” summed up her view: “I think this is a referendum on Harvey Weinstein, not on President Trump.” She delivered the line twice more, with slight variations, at the top of each hour. Earhardt is clearly the brainiest of the three co-hosts, if only because she can get through a broadcast without any notable malapropisms or endorsements of eugenics. Still, inevitably, she plays the role of the down-to-earth Southern gal, asking only the softest of softball questions. (Earhardt, to Ivanka Trump, in July of 2016: “Were you a tractor girl, or were you, like me, the pink Barbie Jeep?” Ivanka: “I was that combination.”)
.. At one point, using some mind-bending rhetorical dark magic, he managed to imply that the real loser in Alabama was neither Trump nor Moore but Hillary Clinton.
.. The Bush Administration was mendacious, but at least it was predictable—the co-hosts had to work hard to build a connection between 9/11 and Iraq, but they didn’t have to worry that they’d wake up one morning to find that the Administration was now blaming the attack on Sudan. These days, hosting “Fox & Friends” is like cheerleading for a player who misses an open shot on goal, then doubles back to score on his own goalie, then storms off in a fit of petulance, complaining that the ref is a loser.