Let us offer you a solution
Those preposterous proposals that come in, every day, on my personal hotline to silliness are some of the best fun. You may think of them as “scam calls”, with the flashing red lights in your mind. I think of them as something different. A study into the mindset that funds the efforts. I remind myself that this is just a job, under pressure, for folks that have mediocre language skills and the ability to read a script.
This week, my area is under the loupe from companies that want to reduce my debt load. Terrible times, and if you can get a gullible one on the line, you can make money. Not you, per se, your employer. Think about it. Offer someone that is barely treading water with their credit card debts. Offer a solution. And so I decided to learn a bit more about the process.
If you can climb enough levels, (in the caller hierarchy) someone will offer a deal that is too good to be true. Your balance isn’t an issue. You will assign several payments “of your current mimimum” to a third party. The caller. Your payment has been hijacked. And after three payments, your debit will be erased. Sort of. Actually, the credit card company will mark you as bad debt, the payments will be forgotten in the mess, the hijackers will disappear and you will be left with the task of rebuilding your “credit score”.
Of course. There’s always a victim. The credit card companies call this a “cost of doing business”. You, in sharp contrast, will learn that having credit is a privilege. Without it, so many things become more difficult. And I don’t mean buying stuff you really didn’t need during a late night Amazon binge.
And the scam rolls on. Only the names and the phone numbers will change.
