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Therapy Apps
Understandably, in the last year and a half the use of therapy apps has increased significantly. For the companies behind the apps, business is booming:
Businesses in the “digital behavioral health” space raised $1.8 billion in venture-capital funding last year, compared to $609 million in 2019. In January, Talkspace announced plans to go public this year in a $1.4 billion SPAC deal. A presentation for investors managed to be simultaneously grim and upbeat in outlining the “enormous” market for its services: More than 70 million Americans suffer from mental illness, according to Talkspace, and the country has seen a 30 percent increase in the annual suicide rate since 2001. Talkspace says 60 percent of its users are in therapy for the first time.
This sounds good! Most research suggests that any therapy is better than none at all. But what sort of therapy do apps like Talkspace provide? It’s mostly not what you’d imagine:
As on a dating app, the therapy-app experience begins with texting: It is the staple of lower-priced plans; live video sessions tend to be added at a premium. Talkspace’s “Unlimited Messaging Therapy™” allows users to message their therapist “24/7,” sending text, audio, or video messages as they choose. The company is staunch in its commitment to describing this service as 24/7, although therapists are expected to respond only once a day, five days a week. (“It’s not 24/7 therapy; it’s 24/7 ability to communicate,” the company’s director of clinical effectiveness told the New York Times last year.) The experience is something like email — an asynchronous exchange of responses as opposed to an in-the-moment conversation — though some services, like BetterHelp and Ginger, allow users to schedule live text chats.
There is nothing inherently wrong with text messaging or asynchronous communication as therapy. And, for people who can’t afford expensive in-person or video sessions with a therapist, it’s not necessarily a bad option. But here’s where it begins to break down - the apps show new patients a smorgasbord of potential therapists, but there’s no guarantee they’ll respond:
After submitting his questionnaire, [Bob] was surprised to see that none of his top matches had any availability for the next three weeks. Beyond that, he had no access to their schedules.
[…]
The second therapist Cait was paired with didn’t respond, so after four more days, she moved on again. She exchanged a few messages with a third therapist, but the woman never followed up after Cait asked when they could schedule. At this point, she had been on the app for a month and had only a ten-minute introductory session. When she contacted customer service, a rep agreed to a few weeks’ worth of a refund (and assured her that she should be hearing from a therapist daily, five days a week), then paired her with a fourth therapist. Cait was excited about this one — when she explained that she’d had trouble finding someone who communicated regularly, her new therapist said she checked messages even on her off days. That was the last Cait heard from her. This time, customer service told her Talkspace was experiencing high demand as a result of the pandemic and offered to put her account on hold.
These are a few anecdotes, and undoubtedly TalkSpace has its success stories, but this is one of the issues with trying to create apps that rely on humans to function. TalkSpace and their competitors need to find licensed therapists - of which there are a finite number - and also somehow deal with surging demand during a global pandemic. Simply closing new enrollments due to excess demand would be out of the question - investors would never! - so instead they give clients the illusion of choice by “matching” them with therapists who are simply too busy or unable to respond.
On the other side of things, you’d expect that therapists were absolutely raking in the bucks due to the pandemic, right? Hop on an app, and you’ve got a huge new client base. Of course it’s not that simple:
For therapists, the logic of compensation is more complicated. Instead of an hourly rate, the payment structures of the platforms attempt to quantify relationships that sprawl across media and time. In the past, Talkspace has said it pays therapists based on “engagement”; the company now says it uses multiple payment structures. BetterHelp uses an opaque formula that involves converting words (of texts exchanged) and minutes (of live interaction) into dollars. [Albert] Thrower said he started tracking his work in a spreadsheet to figure out the hourly rates he was actually making; he topped out around $30 an hour, with a lot of time spent in the low $20s ($30 was the rough estimate most BetterHelp therapists I spoke to offered for their pay per session).
Therapists are dealing with two to three times the number of patients they’d see at an offline practice, and making less than half what they’d charge per session, and even less for text-based communication, which the app expects them to do. So, it doesn’t make financial sense for therapists to use the platform for any length of time, and customers who’ve been lured in by deals and marketing find themselves unable to get the mental health services they may desperately need.
Talkspace expects to earn over $125 million dollars in 2021, though it’s still operating at a loss, likely due to all the marketing and engineering costs a tech company deals with. We know it’s not because they’re paying their therapists anything near a market rate.
Fake Rabbi
A few months ago, a story broke in a New Jersey publication about a Christian man who’d infiltrated Israeli Jewish society and posed as a rabbi for years:
In the ultra-Orthodox enclave in Jerusalem where [Michael] Elkohen now lives, he was often called on to perform marriages, circumcisions and other sacred Jewish rituals. He was even hired to write Torah scrolls, handwritten copies of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, in a task typically reserved for the most devout and highly trained scribes.
But for 15 years, Elkohen was apparently living a lie. The father of five with the black hat, beard and side curls was fluent in Judaic texts and traditions but living a double life: Born Michael Elk in Salem County, he was actually a Christian missionary sent to the Holy Land to convert Jews, according to two anti-missionary groups whose accusations have captivated Israelis in recent days.
The reason “anti-missionary” groups exist in Israel is evangelical groups in the US regularly send over Christians posing as Jews to try to indoctrinate them into believing in Jesus. Really. The Jewish Chronicle explains:
For years, Elk had been involved with a potently evangelical church called MorningStar Ministries in South Carolina, attending prayer sessions and conferences. The MorningStar Ministries website mentions ‘covert missions’, in which evangelists go undercover overseas.
[…]
“He carried on with MorningStar after the divorce,” [Crystal Tracy] recalled. “They are very much about converting the Jews to bring on the end times. I heard this all the time.”
So, this Christian guy from New Jersey at some point decides he wants to pretend to be Jewish, and links up with Christian organizations who support and encourage him to lead a double life. He finds a (second) wife willing to join him in the charade, and they change their names, forge documentation of Jewish ancestry, and move to Israel.
All the while Elk was still deeply involved with MorningStar:
In many ways, the couple was hiding in plain sight. In 2008, Elk reportedly wrote a book entitled The Triumph of Justice about Messianic Judaism and wrote a blog about being a covert missionary, under the name Lev David. The book was published by MorningStar Publications, credited to “An Orthodox Jewish Rabbi” and “Lev David Ministries.”
For her part, Mrs Elk had two Facebook pages, one as a Jew and the other as a Christian. And in 2011 her husband appeared on MorningStar Ministries TV, dressed in Orthodox garb.
In the interview, he openly praised Jesus and prayed together with other Christian devotees. The Jews, he said, needed to be “stirred to jealousy” until they followed Christ.
It really takes a…certain type of person to devote their lives to “infiltrating” another faith to attempt to convert their members and bring about the end times but what do I know, I guess. Jewish groups are trying to run him out of the country, exhume his deceased wife’s corpse, and try him with crimes like performing illegal circumcisions and rabbinical ceremonies, so perhaps he’s going to get a little Old Testament justice.
Texas
Remember when the power went out in Texas and a bunch of people froze to death, and the taxpayers were put on the hook to bail out the power utilities? It turns out some people did make a bunch of money off the winter storm:
It’s now becoming clear that while millions of Texans endured days of power cuts, the state’s gas producers contributed to fuel shortages, allowing pipelines and traders to profit handsomely off them.
Ahhhhh, okay. How handsomely we talking here?
The total comes to about $11.1 billion for a storm that lasted for just five days, according to estimates by BloombergNEF analysts Jade Patterson and Nakul Nair. The cost of gas for power generation alone was about $8.1 billion, or 75 times normal levels. A further $3 billion was spent by utilities providing gas for cooking, heating and fireplaces.
Nice! Two of the major gas pipelines in Texas shut down processing facilities due to freezing weather in the run-up to the storm, which sent prices skyrocketing. Because Texas has a largely deregulated market, it meant that traders were able to cash in:
But as gas production tumbled and providers canceled contracts, power companies were losing supplies by the hour. That forced them into the spot market, handing sellers the power to charge almost any price they wanted, according to power executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They scrambled to find replacement supplies at prices trading at the 9,000 a megawatt-hour price cap for days.
The executives expressed dismay that gas producers can shut-in wells and sellers can effectively pull out of contracts without penalty, while power generators have a public duty to keep the lights on -- or at least try to.
The gas producers think that’s fine, though:
The Texas Oil & Gas Association defended the long-term availability of gas, saying, “With proper planning, Texas has ample natural gas to meet our energy needs even during extreme circumstances.”
Also, the two pipeline companies who control most of the flow through the state began charging 70 to 100 times normal prices as supplies dried up. One of the companies, Energy Transfer, generated two years’ worth of profits in a week. Pretty cool!
Texans will be paying higher prices for gas and electricity for years as the state bails out utilities and passes the costs along to taxpayers. The governor is still blaming wind and solar, despite little evidence they caused the shortages. For now, things have returned to normal, until the next time it drops below freezing, since none of the companies involved have been ordered by the state to winterize their equipment.
Joel Tucker
Remember the incredible story of the angry guy who tracked a ring of debt collection scammers all the way up the ladder, and got a bunch of people indicted for fraud? Well the guy at the top of the ladder was due to be sentenced last week and didn’t show up:
Joel Tucker, whom a top prosecutor in Kansas City once called a “well-dressed thief,” pleaded guilty last year to criminal counts of transporting stolen money, bankruptcy fraud and tax evasion.
[…]
In Joel Tucker’s case, most of the charges stem from his scheme of selling phony consumer information to debt collectors, causing those debt collectors to try to get consumers to pay up on debts they did not actually owe. In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission obtained a $4 million judgment against Tucker for the same scam.
Forging documents to show a federal judge? Not a great idea Joel:
Tucker was called to testify in court about the debts in 2016. When Tucker was ordered to provide the judge documentation to support the validity of the debts he sold, Tucker created a bogus spreadsheet that he turned into the court.
Tucker also owes $12 million in unpaid taxes, and even found time to (illegally) secure himself a PPP loan of $21,000.
Wherever he is, I hope Andrew Therrien is having a nice day.
REvil
A notorious ransomware gang may have been taken offline by actors unknown:
Gone was the publicly available “happy blog” the group maintained, listing some of its victims and the group’s earnings from its digital extortion schemes. Internet security groups said the custom-made sites — think of them as virtual conference rooms — where victims negotiated with REvil over how much ransom they would pay to get their data unlocked also disappeared. So did the infrastructure for making payments.
This is good news! REvil was responsible for causing a lot of human misery as a side effect of its ransomware attacks on hospitals, utility companies, and others. However, one of the unintended consequences of taking down REvil was the companies who haven’t yet negotiated the release of their files now can’t do it:
“What’s the plan for the victims?” asked Kurtis Minder, the chief executive of GroupSense, a digital risk protection company that was negotiating with the extortionists on behalf of a law firm whose data was locked up.
[…]
The big losers would be the companies and towns that do not get their encryption keys, and are locked out of their data, perhaps forever. (Often when ransomware groups disband, they publish their decryption keys. That did not happen on Tuesday.)
Oops! There’s some speculation that REvil went “dark” on their own - like the group who hacked the Colonial Pipeline. It’s an open secret that Russia either supports or simply ignores hacker groups within its borders, but as they’ve become more brazen in recent months, the US has pressured Putin’s government to crack down. Still, bad luck for all the companies who won’t ever get their data back.
Short Cons
WaPo - “Juli A. Mazi, 41, sold “immunization pellets” that she claimed would provide “lifelong immunity” to covid, telling customers the purported treatments contained trace amounts of the disease, according to the Justice Department.”
FiveThirtyEight - ““THC inflation is pernicious, it’s easy to accomplish and there are strong financial incentives to do it,” said Don Land, a professor of chemistry and forensics at the University of California, Davis…”
NYT - “In January, Congress extended federal anti-money laundering regulations, designed to govern the banking industry, to antiquities dealers. The legislation required the Department of the Treasury to join with other agencies to study whether the stricter regulations should be imposed on the wider art market as well.”
Tips, thoughts, or properly regulated public utilities to scammerdarkly@gmail.com