Scam Likely

 

     I've carried a phone in my pocket for 23 years, ever since my wife bought me a little Nokia flip phone for my 42nd birthday. A gift that, at the time, seemed such an intrusion into regular life that I considered throwing it in the river.
     But I kept the phone, through increasingly complicated incarnations, to my latest iPhone 12, which I bought instead of a 15 because it does everything I want at a third of the price.
     In all that time, I've never felt the need to shut off notification of phone calls. But since I signed up for Medicare last month, the spam calls have been so frequent, they grew bothersome. Fraudsters from overseas now show a 312 area code, so I don't know if it's a basement call center in Africa or the official I phoned an hour ago, seeking a comment.

     Now, if you aren't in my contact list, then your call gets dumped straight to voicemail. Which itself is a theft — of time. Friday my mother's doctor's office called, going straight to voicemail, meaning that instead of just fielding the call and dealing with it, I got to play telephone tag for a few hours.  
     In the past, occasionally, Congress would provide some kind of relief from scam calls. Yes, enforcement was spotty and they'd find a way rear up again. 

    But now the problem is bad, and will only get worse, as Trump takes his chainsaw to regulatory agencies, that were already doing a subpar job, allowing us to sometimes carry phones unmolested by crude attempts to rob us. Consumer watchdogs. Regulations against spam. Prosecution of rip-off artists. Out the window.

     When the president is selling access and hawking bitcoin and monetizing fear in an administration that is one giant ongoing grift, it might seem petty to focus on a minor inconvenience like spam calls. But they are also the vanguard of more to come, and we must be constantly on our guard. Years of thefts, large and small, are on deck. We have to try not to fall in, ourselves as individuals, while doing what we can to help our poor country escape from the trick we played on ourselves, the pit we've ... not fallen into. Worse. Dove into, eyes wide open. Climbing out will take all we've got.