Who are these morons, and why has the Do Not Call Registry failed us?
They are after our money with a vengeance – a litany of calls offering nothing of value, threatening us with FBI arrest and IRS foreclosure. It is endless and unrelenting. I finally realized that 99.9 % of the calls coming into my landline were from” these morons;” so, I finally disconnected my answering machine and notified the two “techno dinos” that still used my landline number that if they wanted reach me, they had better call my cell. My cat who must endure the endless calls and beeping from the answering machine, and feign feline indifference, breathed an audible sigh of relief. I could, of course, have gotten rid of this line altogether, but I preserve it for my antiquated alarm system. All are “techno dinos” to a degree.
And the bad news continues. It is expected that this year 50% of cell phone calls will also be spam calls. The rate of growth in spam calls is astounding. According to the call protection company First Orion, which analyzed data from 50 billion calls over 18 months, 3.7% of total calls in 2017 were spam. This jumped ten-fold to 29.2% in 2018 , and its predicted this will rise further to 44.6% by early 2019 and far from finally to 50% by years end. Wow!
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched the Do Not Call Registry on June 27, 2003, and at first it worked well for us. What happened? We can especially ask that question in light of the fact that they continue to prosecute violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which established the registry.
The problem is that technology has outpaced the little FTC. Banks of robots are flaunting the law and making calls through the internet. The worst of it is the ability to disguise phone numbers to resemble local calls, from your neighbors. Why is my “local carper cleaning company” calling me from Montana? I get three or four of these calls a day. I used to send texts like “I’m on my Way,” only to receive neighborly calls from the true owners saying I sent my message to the wrong number.
And, of course, Washington’s response to its own impotence is to privatize by passing the buck on to the carriers. I now get caller ID’s from Verizon that begin with “SPAM?”
So, the situation is not promising. We are left to hope that some software genius somewhere will create a wonder app for us to screen our calls. I’ve tried some of the current ones and they haven’t helped.
In the end, in answer to “who are these morons,?” We return to physics and I am reminded of a T-shirt that I saw at a kiosk in the mall recently. “The Universe is made of protons, neutrons, electrons, & morons.”
(c) DE Wolf 2019
