Crime Doesn’t Pay – Does it?

 Over the years I have written a number of posts in this space about the scourge that robocalls have become over the years, rising from the relatively minor nuisance in my childhood to the present conditions where just answering the telephone can result in becoming the victim of any number of fraud methods. Efforts to eliminate these calls and their associated crimes by legislation have largely failed because it can be extremely difficult to catch the parties involved, many of whom are based outside of the United States, and because motivation for pursuing such cases is inconsistent. A story being reported in USA Today this week may have the answer to one or both problems, however…

According to the article by Mark Snider in USA Today last Wednesday, the FCC had succeeded in tracking down a telemarketing company based in Texas that had been responsible for over a billion such calls, mostly made by “spoofing” real telephone numbers from other area codes. In this case, the calls purported to offer low-cost health insurance from well-known providers, but actually routed anyone who responded to the calls to a call center not affiliated with any of those companies. It was a highly lucrative and significantly destructive scam, and there is nothing to suggest that the companies involved would have stopped committing it, until FCC fined the telemarketers a record $225 million USD…

I’m not primarily a crime writer, but a brief study of the subject will reveal dozens of cases where a specific crime died out when it was no longer profitable to commit. A familiar example might be that when it was no longer possible to make any significant money selling stolen car radios, the number of those crimes decreased from incredibly common in the early 1990s to almost unknown today. Increased penalties by themselves are generally ineffective in deterring crime, since the penalty involved will be irrelevant if there is no chance of being caught, but there are numerous historical examples where fines levied against specific criminals became an important source of revenue for law enforcement officers, or the communities employing them…

Now, I’m not suggesting that municipalities and states engaging in self-funding through the application of excessive fines is necessarily a good idea. History also records a vast number of cases where the enforcement of such laws led directly to major cases of corruption, either by the law enforcement agencies of their employers. But, by the same token, $225 million is enough money to run government agencies of significant size, and the motivation to make arrests that could yield that much revenue is going to be powerful. Combining those factors would make the crime of illegal robocalls much less attractive while at the same time offering a real chance at balancing the budget for many cities and counties…

Realistically, of course, these prosecutions will not eliminate any crime. If fraud committed by telephone auto dialer becomes cost-prohibitive the criminals involved will simply move on to some other form of fraud on some other platform, and the cities involved will have to find some other way to fund their operations. But, speaking as someone who gets between five and ten of these fraudulent calls a day, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these companies being driven out of business, even nobody figures out how to fund our town’s government operations into the bargain…