Derek offers his thoughts on Kamala Harris, the new 2024 reality, and gender polarization in the “boys vs. girls” election. Then we talk about the spam apocalypse. The average American receives one spam call or text every single day, adding up to tens of billions of robocalls and texts per year. Derek welcomes Joshua Bercu, the executive director of Industry Traceback Group, to talk about the history and technology behind robocalls and texts, why it’s been so hard to hold robocallers accountable, how spammers do that thing where they make a call look like it’s coming from a local friend, how we’ve managed to crush certain kinds of robocalls, and what it would take to finally win the war on spam.
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In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Joshua Bercu about the spam apocalypse. They discuss the history, tech, methods, and more behind robocalls and texts Americans receive, on average, daily.
Derek Thompson: Tell us briefly what you do.
Joshua Bercu: So I am the executive director of the U.S. telecom-led Industry Traceback Group. And that is an effort in which we work closely with the industry and with government stakeholders and work to find out where illegal calls, including illegal robocalls, are coming from.
Derek Thompson: Before we dive into the history of robocalls, and spam and scam that inundates us in this age, let’s cover some basics. What are robocalls? When are they legal, and what makes them illegal?
Joshua Bercu: So robocalls, I like to think of them as calls made with an artificial prerecorded voice. That’s one of the areas that they’re triggered in law and they’re illegal anytime to your cell phone without your consent, and anytime to your cell phone or home phone line when they’re telemarketing without your consent.
Derek Thompson: Why are political robocalls legal? At least why do they seem to be legal? Whereas, some commercial robocalls are illegal?
Joshua Bercu: It’s been a lot of balancing over the years, but political robocalls, they’re to your cell phone. If it’s a campaign robocall, they still need your consent, but there is a little more flexibility when those go to home because of things like First Amendment considerations.
Derek Thompson: I want to do a little bit of definition here before we tell the full story. How do modern robocall outfits work? Where are these calls coming from? What kind of organizations are sending them, and why?
Joshua Bercu: There’s a big variety, but they come from all over. As part of our trace back effort, we have traced illegal calls to entities in the United States, Dominican, Republic, India, Pakistan, Cambodia, and really elsewhere. Sometimes when they’re illegal telemarketing calls, that might be a smaller operation that is trying to sell leads and bombard people with calls to try to sell you some really questionable product or service. The scam calls might come from fraud rings in the United States and/or elsewhere. Could be a small fraud ring. It could be global organized crime. And in fact, we often see very sophisticated calling infrastructure in India and elsewhere that is defrauding folks here and elsewhere in the world, then laundering that money through Chinese organized crime. So it can be that sophisticated.
Derek Thompson: I’ve always wondered what is behind the technology that allows robocalls to mimic the area code of the person picking up the phone? Because I feel like one aspect of spam that’s gotten much more sophisticated in the last few years is that I will see a call on my phone, it’ll have a 703 area code—I guess full disclosure, I’m from the Northern Virginia area, so my cell phone number starts with 703—and I’ve always wondered, how do they know to target my phone with the area code that it’s registered to? Is there a name for this kind of technology? And where does it come from?
Joshua Bercu: So the name of the tactic is called “neighbor spoofing,” where they look like they’re your neighbor. In the early days, they might’ve even spoofed your own number to trick you; quickly people caught on, so no one’s calling you from your own number, but now it’s gotten sophisticated enough. I am your neighbor. I’m in D.C. and I’m 202, but I get 240 for nearby Maryland. So it’s gotten that sophisticated, to the point where they’ll even do a nearby area code that’s not the exact area code. And the question of why they can do that is, like so many of the other issues you cover on Plain English, is a little bit the rise of internet technology. And we went from a world where only one person had a phone number or phone line because the house was wired in such a way that you could make phone calls over the internet and plug in whatever phone number you want to use on some of these internet-based calling platforms.
Derek Thompson: Do they work? I mean, I feel like on the one hand I’m pretty good at ignoring robocalls. I might be so good at ignoring robocalls and tech spam that I basically don’t use my phone as a phone anymore, period. I just don’t trust any number that I don’t have a name associated with. But clearly, if this is an economic activity, even if it’s a criminal economic activity that is continuing and growing year after year, it clearly is working. Can you explain to us how robocalls seem to work and is there a number we can associate with the scale at which they seem to be profiting?
Joshua Bercu: So I’m not sure I have a good number to associate with the scale of how they’re profiting, but one of the ways they work is certainly when we’re talking about the very high-volume robocalls. They’re blasting calls to everyone they can, as quickly as they can. They’re just playing the odds game. They don’t need a big hit rate to have success because they’re making billions of calls. Just a small percentage of those calls working is a success in their book. There are also more sophisticated scams that are more targeted. Those are successful in a different way because those will trick people, young and old, technologically savvy and not—they can be successful.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Joshua Bercu
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify