When I was in college, I worked at a scam call center that would sign up people for a "service" that provided listings of foreclosed and rent-to-own homes and repossessed vehicles. This is information you can get for free from the courthouse, but the target demo would be people dumb and desperate enough to pay for it. During the course of the call, you'd get them to agree to sign up for a "free 7 day trial" with a $1.95 "activation fee." If they didn't cancel before the 7 days are up, they were charged $20, plus whatever additional bullshit services you'd get them to agree to sign up for. The script was designed to flow so that you'd get them to agree to sign up for shit without them even realizing it, sometimes totalling up to 80 bucks of monthly charges until they cancelled. These people definitely couldn't afford that. The management would tell us to ask them what kind of house they wanted for what price. No matter what they said, if they said they wanted a 4 bedroom house for 10 bucks a month, you were supposed to mash the keyboard to make noise and say "Ok...I'm seeing [made up number] homes in your area. We can help you get into one of those homes." It was real scummy.
The people that worked there were a trip; truly a bizarre cross-section of humanity. You'd have gang members with teardrop tattoos, old ladies, homeless people, ex-cons, foreigners that spoke no English, white guys with cornrows, occultist weirdos (name more examples). One supervisor would be a Carribean black guy, the next would be a skinhead with swastika tattoos on his elbows. There was an old hippie lady that would tell me stories like about she was on LSD at a music festival in the 60's when the cops came and started calling her name on a megaphone. It turned out that her father died and they told her while she was peaking on acid. She also asked me if I ever read The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. People like that.
The first day I sat next to a Mexican that had a little black box next to him. He was showing me the ropes and every now and then, the box would beep and he'd have to press a button. It turned out he was on parole for weapons charges and that was a GPS unit that checked his location since he was only allowed to go to work and the grocery store. He would also tell me about his scam of trading food stamps for cash and about a time he got into a fight in prison where he ripped a guy's cheeks open with his fingers. Eventually he violated his parole and was sent back.
I made friends with an old ex-con that looked like Cliff Claven from Cheers. He did a 10 year bid for getting caught with 100 lbs of marijuana. I asked him about life in the joint. He said the Aryan gangs tried to recruit him but he told them "No way. I'm the shot caller of the OMG: the one man gang." If you're an unaffiliated white, you go in a group called the Woodpile, but I'm sure enough people have heard about that. I'd give him rides to the Salvation Army where he lived and he'd help me buy beer. One time after getting some Miller High Life, he grabbed a couple bags of ice we didn't pay for. I cracked a joke: "Man, you're a real hustler, huh?" He said "I'm not a hustler, [my name], I'm a survivor." He ended up moving into a shack in the Mexican's backyard and last I heard he had gotten an apartment and a girlfriend and was driving a cab. Pretty inspirational in a weird way. Guy really was a survivor.
Eventually, credit card companies blacklisted the call center. Then our paychecks started bouncing. You could only cash them as ghetto gas stations. Then one day the doors were locked. The guy that ran the operation was a real piece of garbage (whose name sounded fake so I'm thinking he was a crypto, although I have no proof). He would run companies like this in other states, let them run their course, and either sell them or just shut them down. He got fined by the FTC but it was a drop in the bucket for him. Apparently when some workers confronted him at his mansion to get paid, he invited them in and was talking a mile a minute because he was tweaking so hard. As far as I know, he never faced any criminal charges. It was a shit job, but a very interesting experience for sure.
