The Case of the Phantom Caller

This was some fantastic investigating by Alex in this episode. Reply-All has done some really great journalism and reporting, including their episode on the fake tech support phone scam[0] and a more recent episode on the effect of the Backpage laws on sex work in general[1].

Tangential but related: I've been getting spam phone calls from local-to-my-number area codes (760, 619, and 858) at a rate of about 2-3 a day for more than a year now. It's funny because I don't live in San Diego anymore, so they're not actually local calls for me. VZW seems unwilling or unable to stop it. Robokiller, which promises incredible results catches 1-2 calls a week, but because the spammers are using SIP spoofing they never actually call from the same number, making it hard to compile a consistent and relevant blacklist.

Frankly, if I didn't have a chronic medical condition, and the specialist I see for it didn't require that I be able to receive phone calls to deal with scheduling, I would have insisted all of my regular contacts switch to FaceTime Audio, Signal, Telegram, etc and just disabled incoming telephone calls to my phone entirely.

[0] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long-distance [1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/119-no-more-safe-harbo...

I just want to say that I really enjoyed this particular episode and thought Alex did an amazing job of figuring out what was going on. Where ever there is a system tied to payments there will be someone trying to game the system for profit.

Since this was from September, I am really interested now as to how the FBI investigation has gone. I'm just imagining some AT&T greybeard in suspenders putting his hands up and slyly saying "you've got me".

Kind of reminds me of the footage in William Gibson‘s ‘Pattern Recognition.’ Hearing this also made me more curious about phone scams than anxious, which is a nice change.