I was having one of those weeks when absolutely nothing was going right. There were things I meant to do that didn’t work out, or I completely forgot about them. I went to pick up Daughter Number Four and went to the wrong place. I wasn’t getting answers to emails. I inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings and couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
It was such a parade of small disasters that it started to feel surreal; the sort of thing that, if I was more superstitious in nature, I might suspect of having a pattern. Especially as, while all this was going on, I kept getting missed calls.
The first was from a UK number, which struck me as odd when I saw it, but I was so addled at the time I didn’t think of it again for some hours. But when I did, and googled the number, I was unsurprised to learn that it was from a number associated with scam calls. So I blocked it.
But the next day there was a call from a slightly different number. I blocked that too. And then a call the day after that and the day after that. So far, I’ve had 11 calls, one a day, from 11 different numbers. Ten were from the UK and didn’t leave a message. One was from Belgium and left a message in the form of a recording telling me that there was a large bill in my PayPal account and I should dial one now.
It’s possible to google each number and discover which scam is associated with it. That I have a large tax bill. That I’m being offered a job. That money has suddenly disappeared from my bank account. I assume it will stop when they’ve run through the full gamut of disaster scenarios. But it’s worthwhile for them. Worldwide, phone scamming rakes in more than €1 trillion a year.
There are no figures for Ireland: partially because many people who have been conned are too embarrassed to report it. Yet surveys have established that most Irish people receive scam calls or emails on a monthly basis. Phone companies in various countries regularly attempt to shut down the fraudulent numbers, but there are millions of them, and the scammers are relentless. One number is shut down and three more spring up.
Some of the people who work in these call centres have given interviews: clever young men from poor backgrounds wearing designer clothes and flashy watches
It’s one of the many inconveniences that come from the convenience of having a mobile phone. Yet it left me with an odd feeling of vulnerability. Every day, for the past 11 days, someone has tried to mug me. The calls were almost certainly made by a machine and almost certainly didn’t originate from the UK. But the call from Belgium was aimed to get me to ring back and speak to a flesh-and-blood person.
I can’t help but wonder who that person is, where they are and how they feel about what they do: sitting in some grubby office for hours at a time, searching for the scared and vulnerable to extort. Some of them are victims themselves: tricked into joining forced labour camps and threatened with torture to maintain their productivity. But many do it willingly.
[ Banks warn scams will worsen with criminals’ use of AIOpens in new window ]
A lot of these illegal call centres are in India, and some of the people who work in them have given interviews: clever young men from poor backgrounds wearing designer clothes and flashy watches. And all maintained that what they do isn’t so bad: the people they scam are rich and can afford to take the hit. They pointed out that they use the money to help their families, to give other people jobs.
It’s a curious thing that’s common to all of us: a desire to be moral. No matter what the circumstances – and the world faces even greater threats than phone scammers – no one wants to think of themselves as a bad person.
