A woman who was bombarded by wrong-number robocalls has received hundreds of thousands of dollars. Could this become a business model?
RoboCash
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Just the thing for struggling cartoonists and retired nitpickers ?… 😉
Henri
Your art is booming. Maximum character and emotion with minimal strokes. Well done Sir.
So, the robocaller rang her number up 153 times, but the machine was looking for somebody else? Let’s say her name is Jane Doe, but the robo-marketer was looking for Pepe Lepita. Was it because Pepe was late on his payments, or perhaps successfully made the internet switch to a Netflix existence, which TW of course treats as heretical.
It seems to me that this judge is punishing TW for harassing the wrong rube. Now, if TW had been calling Pepe 153 times to remind him that his 50-year contract to provide minimal entertainment services for a random eight hours a day, five and a half days a week was in financial errors and that he needed to surrender the rest of his banking information in order to stop the crucifixion, then the judge (whose ex-wife of two marriages ago got all the Time/Warner stock in the divorce) may have seen it differently … or probably not.
In any event, the crux of the matter was that TW was — in a mechanistically abusive fashion — harassing the wrong person for whatever purpose to a functionally insane degree. Because the same insanity was probably happening to other people in a similar fashion, the judge decided to make TW do a double-take on ALL of its not-quite-A-I quality infrastructure.
Meantime, Ted’s above solution to financial solvency is basically misguided, because Jane was really being compensated for horribly suffering the robo-call consequences of somebody else’s digitally delivered punishment. By following Ted’s suggestion, if you sign up for a gagload of services and then get on robo-call death-row because you summarily cancel them all only a short time later, that same too-corporate-to-care hanging judge may instead just decide that you deserve the abuse.
The devil’s in the details.
DanD
Hate robocalls. You can’t abuse a robot like you can a real, live human.
I often put ’em on speaker, go back to work & wait until a human kicks in. (Anyone who takes a telemarketing job deserves abuse.)