I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center.
That already feels morally un-great, and messing with them further no longer felt like something I could justify.
I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table).
In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it.
And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.
"It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief."
I used to believe this. But I have since changed my mind. Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.
A couple years ago, I was on the return flight from France to the US with wife and kid in tow. At the airport, I learned that the flight was a code-share. The airline I had booked with was meaningless. Meaning, the seats that I had paid extra for so we could sit together was no longer the seats that I picked. Even though I spent extra money to get what I asked for, I wasn't getting it because the real airline said <random paragraphs of verbiage>. Meaning myself, wife, and kid would no longer be sitting together on an 8 hour flight despite me paying extra for it, five months in advance.
So I performed what I called my "angry frustrated customer routine". I became loud and agitated several times at the airport. Until I got my way and got what I had paid for.
> Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.
And how much choice do those reps have? Their choice is "follow the playbook" or "go out and find a new job".
It sounds like you yelled at someone who was not responsible for your original issue. You weren't performing. You were being.
>It's like people who get mad at customer service people
Except the customer service people willingly accept a job to act as an in-between so that any appropriate anger at a company is directed at an employee. To what extent do companies purposefully make use of this to prevent outrage directed at them? Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue?
At what point does being kind shift into a sort of pacifist mindset, that while great if everyone used it, creates fertile ground for far worse approaches to human relationships to flourish and spread, leading to the quality of the average approach to human relationships declining?
> Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue?
My feelings of pity towards the people being literally enslaved don't mean I don't want the scams to stop, or for the people to be liberated.
It just means I don't scream profanities at someone who had their passport stolen.
One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place. The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven.
Spoilers for season 3 ahead
Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wildflowers, so you pick them and bring them to her. +10 points.
In modern society, to do the same you'd drive to the florist and buy some flowers, then drive to your mom's. +10 points. But the PE firm that bought the florist laid of 100s of workers, and -10 points for supporting them. And the flowers were picked by underpaid exploited immigrants, -10 points. And you dumped a bunch of CO2 in the air from your drive and gave a newborn asthma, -10 points.
The show was saying that because of the choices that modern society and late-stage capitalism force upon us, nobody has gone to heaven for decades.
In her book Medicine Stories, Aurora Morales speaks of the impact our participatory existence in an unjust world has on us.
We have to harden our hearts in order to walk by the unhoused, harden our hearts to buy stuff me know is produced by slavery, pretend we don’t see the extortionist, your-money-or-your-life nature of industrialized health services, harden our hearts to the slaughter of billions of animals for the meat industry, pretend we don’t witness the ongoing ecocide and destruction of our only biosphere.
That’s before the daily servings of doom via our doom-monetizing, amygdala-destroying media outlets.
Such levels of ongoing denial and desentization impact us to the point that we live in an increasingly unhealthy state of mass psychosis. We are all freaking out internally, pretending that all is OK externally.
Thanks for bringing this up, sums up how I feel about life.
And underlines one of my biggest realisations of recent times: depression is a valid/natural response to helplessness and a world of injustice...
I guess that show has been over for nearly 5 years, but it might still be a good idea to spoiler this reveal for folks who haven't gotten around to it so you don't lose 3 points.
Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me.
I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment!
My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH.
Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues,
It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.
I wouldn't be embarrassed. I'd be embarrassed on their behalf, maybe, for half-assing it so badly.
I don't owe anybody who calls me out of the blue my time, especially when their shit isn't together. My mom answers the phone and actually talks to these people, and politely says "no thank you", whereas I don't even pick up the phone for certain area codes, and certainly don't engage in conversation if it's clear it's some bullshit I do not care about.
> One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place. The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven.
I should have been clearer that I meant the more-obviously illegal telemarketers, which frankly are the only ones left.
Having said that, I have no moral problem with keeping them on the line and dragging out a conversation without being rude - every minute they're speaking with me is a minute they're not trying to convince my elderly grandmother to switch her power bill to some fly-by-night shitfarm.
> I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center.
Are you talking about people who have been convicted of a crime and are calling you at dinner to sell you something or conduct a survey, or about people in Southeast Asia who have been kidnapped and are being forced to run scams? I've heard of this happening in Southeast Asia, but not with actual convicts, only kidnapping victims.
It's odd to me that people feel worse about unpleasant things happening specifically to convicted felons than to the general public.
If you were being mean to a random jerk, and then he pointed out "By the way, I roughed up my wife last night" would you feel more bad about being mean? But you'd feel worse if it turned out he was doing time for that same crime?
Note: I know that there could be people truly wrongfully convicted included in the set of all prisoners, but I certainly don't think that's common enough that they should be treated better than the average person.
Second note: I also am not saying being a felon means one should be punished forever or anything. Just that, yeah, prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. It's what most people do outside of prison. Anyone who doesn't accept those terms, I fully support them clicking "Decline" by not commiting crimes.
>> prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment.
The problem I have with this is that last time I checked, nearly all sentences for people going to prison are incarceration, not incarceration+forced labour. It's the same as people cheering up prison rape because "they deserve it" or "if they don't like it, they should just stop committing crimes". Again, no one is ever sentenced to prison+prison rape, and failing to protect prisoners from each other is a massive failure of the state.
And of course we have to acknowledge that having prison population working for close to nothing creates really perverse incentives, both on the side of the state as well as enterprises employing prisoners. In fact I'd argue that even if you feel that it's entirely fair and deserved you should still be against it to stop incentivising all the nasty shit happening around it. Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, or if they are it should be on public works not on anything that the state charges money for.
Respectfully, no it's not. Our society does in theory, and should, recognize a universal right to not be raped. It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of, with the possible exception of the Royal Family. Though I understand most of their income comes from their historical ownership of vast lands, which is slightly different.
> Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working,
Why should they only be sitting? Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies? If we aren't offering a UBI to random non-criminal lazy people, I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
Alright, maybe the comparison took it too far but I hope you see my point - the sentence is imprisonment, not imprisonment+X.
>>It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of
Nonsense - how about the ill and the disabled? Why do we take care of them even if they don't work? Unless when you say "our society" you mean some society that doesn't have that - but then I can't possibly know where you live.
>>Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies?
Uhm....almost every developed country offers some kind of socialized housing and food stamps if you need them?
>>I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
It's not their right - it's ours. We lock them up and they should stay locked up. They should sit in prison all day not because it's their privilege to be sitting around all day bored, but because it's our privilege to walk streets free of criminals - we want them there.
Also observe how even I acknowledged that prisoners could be used for work - any kind of public work where they aren't a danger to society is fine with me. But the moment you introduce a profit motive you are creating breeding ground for corruption and incentives which have absolutely nothing to do with justice.
That’s the extreme stretch a certain lobby has been pushing. Even in deep blue California, where that was the marketing for Prop 6 last year, 55% of voters laughed that characterization off the ballot. Sure, it’s like slavery, except that you’re not born into it but rather you ended up in prison by choice, it’s fixed in term instead of for life, they by law can’t physically harm you, they can’t enslave your offspring, etc etc.
There are downsides to engaging and not engaging, but I’m still on team engage and waste time.
Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear (or automate and remove the torture and amplify the attempts 1000x)
> Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear
You're wasting more of your time than theirs. Think of it, you've already got your own answer. This is a whole industry and that implies people that work full time. How much time do you spend on this? Have you spent your whole day optimizing your workflow and answers to get an optimal response? Because they most certainly have.
But the industry has a business model and if the margins are slim enough the model doesn't work and the industry collapses.
Think about a drive through that serves three rushes in a day, people driving to work, people on theyr lunch break, and people driving home.
If each rush is an hour long how many people would need to DDOS the drive through with frivolous complaints and time wasting bullshit like 'oh let me find my change, just a second... Oops I dropped it sorry, let me get that... Oh I can't open my door can you be a dear and send someone outside to get it?' to completely disrupt the entire rush and therefoe the vital flow of cash?
If I spend twenty minutes on the phone with a scammer while I'm doing house chores like washing dishes and folding laundry that's 20 minutes that the scammer isn't making money.
If he has a 12 hour shift that's only 36 people to completely eliminate his chance of making any revenue.
How many people need to do this to eliminate the profit from this employee?
I would have thought the chief limitation in an operation like this would be that your profits are (presumably) Pareto distributed, so 80% of profits come from 20% of victims. This would make the operation more like mining Bitcoin than serving lunches. One thing that supports your theory that the margins are slim, however, is that there are crime syndicates kidnapping people to work in these call centers. If the wages didn't represent a significant marginal cost, they wouldn't need to risk attracting international attention by kidnapping people in the first place.
That just makes it seem like you're also exploiting the people who are forced into this, only for a different motive than the ones who forced them into it in the first place. Maybe there's a better way to entertain yourself than this?
I send them messages written in Khmer asking if they need help. (Most of the victims are not themselves Cambodian and cannot read this. But the messages are not for them; they're to spook their captors.)
The news reports I see said most of the scam centers are in Myanmar run by Chinese gangs. The victims are mostly Chinese, but there are reports of Japanese, Kenyans and many other nationalities being trafficked. They are forced to work 18 hours a day and tasered when they don't meet their quota.
I used to be mean to scammers and ask if their mother was ashamed of them etc., but I recently tried another tactic and told them I loved them. It works a lot better. One told me his name and where they were located. It costs me nothing to tell them I love them. Maybe they need to hear it.
There is a video out there where a scammer gets scammed, and his reaction goes from fury to terror. I think it's because he'll be held accountable for the loss, and is likely working in horrible conditions. It's sad because this video was very popular entertainment on YouTube for a while.
