On the Trail of the Robocall King

[mahatmakanejeeves]

ALEX W. PALMER
SECURITY
03.25.190 6:00 AM
ON THE TRAIL OF THE ROBOCALL KING

PART ONE

BRAD YOUNG, A lawyer at TripAdvisor, arrived at the company’s offices in Needham, Massachusetts, on October 12, 2015, to find an email from his boss, Seth Kalvert, the company’s general counsel. In itself that wasn’t strange. As a travel site built on crowdsourced wisdom, where hundreds of millions of ordinary people post reviews and rate businesses, TripAdvisor is susceptible to fakery meant to inflate the ranking of a so-so restaurant or stain the reputation of a storied hotel. Young oversaw a group responsible for fending off these efforts, so he frequently got questions from Kalvert about con artists, cunning new deceits, and other shady corners of the law.

BUT THIS EMAIL was different. Kalvert’s wife had received a robocall offering an exclusive vacation deal as a reward for her loyal accumulation of “Trip­Advisor credits.” That would have been nice if TripAdvisor credits were a thing, but they weren’t. The call was also odd because TripAdvisor didn’t engage in telemarketing, much less robocalling. Kalvert wanted Young to look into it. ... The anti-fraud team was, in Young’s words, “the company’s secret sauce,” adept at tackling every deception the internet had to offer. But the hustle meant to entice Kalvert’s wife relied on old-school telephony. Cracking it would require an unusual set of skills. Luckily, Young knew just the person to turn to.

Fred Garvin had joined TripAdvisor’s anti-fraud team eight years earlier. He’d been employed in a series of short-term jobs: mechanic, audio editor, anything that seemed interesting enough to hold his attention for a while. He was out of work when a friend saw an opening for a content moderator at TripAdvisor and urged Garvin to apply. He worked at home for a while, under the radar, but pretty soon managers started noticing his obsessive streak and a knack for what he called “research.” As a kid growing up in a small New England town in the pre-internet era, he’d tracked down the addresses of celebrities so that he could request an autograph; he got a postcard signed by the B-52s and one from Mr. Bill, a famous Saturday Night Live character from the 1970s. (The name “Fred Garvin” is another SNL reference, one of several professional aliases he adopted to protect his identity from the scammers and fraudsters he chases. It comes from an old sketch with Dan Aykroyd as Fred Garvin, male prostitute.) Garvin’s manager recommended him for a position with the anti-fraud team. “He’s the most cynical person I’ve ever met,” she said. “He will question everything.” He was a perfect fit.

Young asked Garvin to look into the suspicious phone call. He said he figured it was probably the work of “some two-bit hustler” and wouldn’t take long to sort out. Garvin, though, had only one phone call to go on, and a simple question: Who was on the other end of the line?
....

[Ptah]

1. The next to last paragraph reminds me of Alice's Restaurant

He has a new idea: What if he could figure out the identities of those
people and uncover the marketplace where robocallers find and hire
voice actors? Could he nip a campaign in the bud? Better yet, what if,
rather than ignoring robocalls, every American answered every call? If
enough people pressed through to the call-center agents and toyed
with them for hours, the enterprises would be deprived of sales and
the robocallers driven into oblivion!

Alice's Restaurant

Or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like
That, there's only one thing you can do
Walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in, say, "Shrink, you
Can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant", and walk out
You know, if one person, just one person, does it, they may think he's
Really sick and they won't take him
And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and
They won't take either of them
And if three people do it! Can you imagine three people walkin' in, singin'
A bar of "Alice's Restaurant" and walkin' out? They may think it's an
Organization!
And can you imagine fifty people a day? I said FIFTY people a day
Walkin' in, singin' a bar of "Alice's Restaurant" and walkin' out? Friends
They may think it's a Movement, and that's what it is THE Alices's
Restaurant anti-massacre movement! And all you gotta do to join is to
Sing it the next time it comes around on the guita

[dalton99a]

2. Great read