Lured In
Catfishing
This newsletter’s relevant definition of catfishing is the process of luring someone into a relationship by means of a fictional persona. There have been high profile examples of catfishing, for nebulous reasons. Some catfishers do it for money, some for companionship or sympathy. Whatever the reason, catfishing can be quite effective if the perpetrators are sophisticated enough to be believable.
It will not shock you to learn that there are vast international networks of ‘chat’ services built to catfish vast sums of money from lonely people:
Liam is one of hundreds of freelancers employed all over the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites.
In Liam’s case, a company called vDesk hired him as a ‘freelance customer support representative’. His job was to use a system of fake personas - called ‘virtuals’ - to chat with paying clients on a network of romance sites. The site operators accumulate reams of personal data on their clients, which freelancers like Liam use to maintain and expand their relationships with virtuals:
One, seen by WIRED, looks like this:
Andrea667 (45), lonely divorcee looking for a man
Home: Chesham Bois - 3 bed House with her kids
Job: Owner of a makeup & beauty products shop in Watford 10-6pm, Mon-Sat
Food/Drinks: pub lunch, lamb jalfrezi, strong Brazilian coffee
The idea is to keep conversations as believable as possible, because clients pay per message sent, around two Euro (!) each. This is facilitated through microtransactions involving packs of ‘coins’ clients buy on the sites.
In addition to collecting deeply personal information on each client, chat sites employ a different set of freelancers to concoct believable profiles for their virtuals:
Another former freelancer for vDesk, who was hired to create profiles in a country in Eastern Europe (to protect her privacy, WIRED is also not naming the country), says she was asked to divide her city into economic zones to make the profiles more believable. “It has to make sense,” she says, “if you had a banking executive living in, say, a students’ area it would seem suspicious.”
She wasn’t sure where the photos used to illustrate the profiles were coming from. “I don’t want to think about it,” she says, describing the work as “like making Sims characters.”
For whatever reason, vDesk freelancers only adopt a virtual’s personality for two minutes at a time:
For two minutes, Alice says, that means you’re “a distinguished woman with multiple postgraduate degrees,” then for the next two minutes you’re “a teenage girl with crazy interests.” The freelancers have to be thorough. “You have to stay alert to weather and news in the fake’s location,” says Alice, “so you can pretend you are a person you are not.” Liam puts it more bluntly: “You have to be prepared to fuck with people’s feelings.”
Indeed! It is difficult enough to track down companies operating networks of anonymized dating sites from countries like Cyprus and Switzerland, but is any of this actually…illegal? The experts WIRED spoke to couldn’t give a definitive answer, because each site has a voluminous Terms & Conditions page disclosing customers may end up talking to virtuals to ‘enhance the entertainment experience.’ Individual countries may have laws against these types of sites, but how would they enforce them? Catfishing and romance scams work because people are lonely, and companies like vDesk are extremely adept at collating and utilizing their private confessions to keep them on the hook.
The freelancers roped into these gigs are no less desperate. They make a scant fraction of what the sites charge:
Workers earn around 7 cents per message, or €2 an hour. For the company where Liam freelanced, the shifts were six hours a day, six days a week, “and they want you to be active on screen all that time—no breaks,” he says. The 36-hour weeks got him around €400 a month. “It was a pittance,” he says.
The exploitation doesn’t stop there - some freelancers sublease their accounts out to people in poorer countries who can’t get hired by freelancing firms:
Idris works on his phone six hours a night for about 400 Naira (87¢) an hour.” While he chats, he pretends to be the owner of the account, who is pretending to be a woman in the United States, who is pretending to be hundreds of virtual women.
It’s hard to imagine the toll this takes on everyone in the process - the lonely folks forking over hard-earned money typing a few lines to a virtual, and the freelancers paid to create and maintain the fiction for poverty wages. The desperation economy is thriving, and there’s no shortage of unscrupulous people ready to take advantage of it.
Harley Davidson
Harley has spent a long time building its brand. Its riders are tough guys, doing tough things at the maximum number of decibels. Perhaps cultivating a spirit of rugged individualism amongst its owners has had a few unintended side effects - like a high rate of loan default:
Harley last week said that its credit loss rate was 3.2% in the first quarter, up from its typical rate of about 2%. The company said the first quarter is usually the worst for such losses because some customers tend to make their payments during the spring and summer riding season only to become delinquent later in the year.
Harley does much of its own financing, which means its responsible for repossessing hogs from borrowers who fall behind on payments and, well, that’s not going so great either:
The Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker said it can’t find enough agents to repossess bikes from buyers who fall behind on their payments, which Harley executives attributed to a shrinking number of professionals willing to take on the task.
What Harley executives don’t mention, however, is the company’s stingy relationship with the repo industry:
Some repossession companies said Harley doesn’t pay enough for a job that is more complex and dangerous than reclaiming cars—and, like other lenders, doesn’t pay at all if a recovery agent fails to come back with the goods.
“They expect the work for free, and that’s what we’re trying to get away from,” said Vaughn Clemmons, who is president of Automobile Recovery Bureau in Houston and head of the American Recovery Association.
We are no fans of repo companies around these parts, because they are sent (sometimes erroneously) to take away things people may depend upon for their livelihoods. But Harleys? Have at it, repoers. You’re doing the owners a favor in terms of life expectancy.
The Harley story is also the story of the last few years upending entrenched businesses in America’s debt punishment industry:
People in the repossession business agree, saying their employee base shrank by as much as 40% over that period. They said work dried up as stimulus payments and enhanced unemployment benefits helped consumers stay current with their bills, and as some states imposed temporary moratoriums on repossessions.
There are other ripple effects from people being able to pay their bills for a change:
At National Powersport Auctions, which specializes in motorcycles, Chief Executive Jim Woodruff said he saw a two-decade low last year in the number of repossessed units hitting the auction floor. About a quarter of his auction volume comes from repossessions, he said.
Won’t someone think of the powersports auctioneers? Or the tow truck drivers, forced to seek more meaningful work?
Mr. Clemmons said the pandemic prompted some of his colleagues to put their tow trucks to less stressful and more profitable use, such as roadside assistance.
“Who wants to back up in a driveway at 3 a.m. and get shot at?” he said. “You can make the same money doing something else.”
The average repo agent makes around $350 per recovery, and the rate hasn’t changed in decades, so is it surprising they would rather work out of the line of fire, helping stranded motorists change tires?
Retail Crime
Speaking of stealing from unsympathetic corporate giants, Target claimed last month it was facing losses of more than a billion dollars due to ‘organized retail crime’:
Target’s inventory loss, called shrink, totaled about $763 million last fiscal year, based on calculations from the company’s financial filings. With the anticipated increase, shrink this year would surpass $1 billion.
The thing about claiming organized gangs of thieves are somehow pilfering half a billion dollars’ worth of stuff from Target’s two thousand stores is there’s…no real way to verify it?
It can be difficult to quantify theft, since shrink includes inventory loss from other causes, such as employee theft or damage, too.
Yeah! Retail executives seem eager to paint themselves into the corner of claiming sophisticated gangs of thieves are robbing them blind while also saying…it’s not a big deal?
“The country has a retail theft problem,” Home Depot CFO Richard McPhail said on a call with CNBC on Tuesday. “We’re confident in our ability to mitigate and blunt that pressure, but that pressure certainly exists out there.”
Which is it, mister McPhail? They can’t claim retail theft is so out of control they’ll have to make major changes that would impact profitability or share price, because investors will get nervous. But! They need some sort of scapegoat for increases in ‘shrink’ (the industry’s term for inventory losses) because the likely real answer - a widespread move towards self-checkout kiosks and a reduction in staffing - is a self-inflicted problem.
Retail crime stories make great headlines, and the media has lapped them up for years:
Retailers and business groups have repeatedly spoken out about a crisis level of theft during the pandemic and complained of criminal groups stealing products in often violent “smash-and-grab” incidents.
The problem is, the numbers don’t back up the panic:
According to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual survey of around 60 retail member companies, shrink is a “rapidly ballooning issue.” In 2021, retail shrink hit $94.5 billion, up only 4% from 2020 but a 53% jump from 2019.
But, in fact, the average shrink rate as a percentage of sales dropped to 1.4% in 2021 from 1.6% in 2020, according to the latest NRF survey. That number has hovered around 1.4% for more than a decade.
Retail sales bounced back after pandemic restrictions eased, driving up theft and losses along with revenues and profits, meaning loss remained in line with historical trends. These are the self-reported numbers circulated by the retail industry trade group which can’t be verified or fact-checked in any way, and they undercut their own argument!
Really, retail executives need excuses to bring more cops into stores, when they aren’t trying to use police as their private security force against people abusing the self-checkout systems fueling losses. If your shortsighted, draconian cost-saving measures may be causing negative outcomes, it’s easier to paint kids in hoodies as organized retail theft gangs capable of stealing hundreds of millions’ worth of deodorant.
Texas
We’ve talked about the fragility of Texas’s power grid, with its heavy reliance on gas leaving it vulnerable to extreme heat and other weather events. The good (?) news for Texans is that the state may be able to supplement some of that dirty energy with an aggressive push into green sources like wind and solar. Or, it might, if its own leaders don’t get in the way:
Texas embraces a famously laissez-faire approach to energy development, but now some of its most anti-regulatory lawmakers are pushing new rules and permitting requirements for solar and wind, while backing measures that would bolster natural gas.
Texas is one of the nation’s leaders in building green energy facilities, with around 40 percent of its energy this year coming from wind and solar. The problem is, the state’s oil and gas industry is entrenched and extremely powerful, all the way up to the governor’s office:
One of the bills in question would require large-scale wind and solar farms to win the approval of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, whose members are appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R), a staunch supporter of fossil fuels. New projects would be subject to a state environmental impact review, developers would have to pay a yearly fee, and they would need a new permit anytime they made significant changes to existing projects.
State lawmakers, at the urging of their donors and vocal groups of rural landowners who believe turbines and panels spoil the, uh, natural beauty of Texas prairieland or whatever, are taking steps to curtail tax credits, block development of new projects, and make it more difficult for green energy companies in the state to operate. States like Texas have fully committed to their narrow, donor-driven definitions of what ‘free’ markets should look like, and bitter partisan political divides enshrine their power, enabling them to act on behalf of their favored special interests while ignoring the needs of anyone who hasn’t written them a check lately.
Short Cons
NPR - “"You think of a dog as not having an agenda," Hebert says. "But the fact is, they're influenced by their handlers' agenda and they want to please their masters."”
New Yorker - “Planned Parenthood’s motto is “Care. No matter what.” These words suggest an uncompromising commitment to serving patients. Yet some pro-choice advocates feel that the group, along with other large organizations that have shaped the modern abortion-rights movement, has lately seemed more focussed on self-preservation than on taking bold risks.”
American Prospect - “Millions of young people who have voted for Democrats in record numbers in the past two elections will endure what will feel like a new financial obligation of hundreds of dollars per month. And if the history of the student loan program is any guide, the process will overflow with errors, mistakes, and frustration.”
Daily Beast - “The murder rate in San Francisco is significantly lower than that of the entire state of Florida—an incredible statistic, given that crime is usually more concentrated in cities. The murder rate in Los Angeles is significantly lower than major Florida cities like Miami and Tallahassee.”