In the digital age, crime is often all about economies of scale. Many of the tools we’ve built make things very easy for criminals. It’s cheap to send millions of emails, so spam is a problem. You probably knew that. But you might not know how cheap it is to carpet-bomb the world with scam phone calls. I was told recently that a criminal can call every telephone in Los Angeles for $1,000 or so.
If you are a criminal, these numbers work for you. Figure one successful scam might net a couple of thousand bucks, and that means it pencils out to call everyone in Los Angeles looking for one single victim.
And this plays out in the real world. In the so-called “car crash scam,” criminals randomly dial hundreds of thousands of numbers, looking for someone who was recently in a car crash. When they get a lucky “hit,” it’s fairly easy to convince a traumatized victim that they must pay upfront cash to trigger their auto insurance coverage.
Pause and think about this for a moment: We’ve made it cost-effective for criminals to randomly dial entire cities, looking for just a couple of people who fit the profile of an easy mark for the scam they are running. Our technology is being used against us.
This is some of what I learned during my discussion with Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail, a company that fights robocalls. For years, telecommunications firms have held press conferences and Congress has held hearings on robocalls, but it seems like the problem…
