Senior Citizen Scams
I think all of us are shocked when we first recognize the signs of getting older; With me, with me it was seeing a first gray hair near the tip of my sideburns. There were other irrefutable signs, like my little sister becoming a grandmother, although she was a young bride in her teens who quickly started a family, and my 16-year-old niece got pregnant. And of course, you get the first of literally hundreds of junk mail from AARP, even before you turn 50.
But an ugly fact of life is that criminals are lured by huge government spending programs, especially senior entitlements (i.e., social security and Medicare. My Mom, who still has a landline, got targeted recently. She filters a lot of incoming calls using caller id. She got a call recently which her caller id identified as coming from her own phone number. She, correctly, refused to take the call, but didn't know how this was possible. I personally hadn't encountered it, but email scammers spoof personally email addresses all the time. (Every once in a while when I check my spam filter, I'll see emails purportedly coming from my own email account.) I suggested this was a similar ploy by scammers looking to get past the use of caller id to ignore unfamiliar phone numbers. But more to the point, a simple Google search on salient terms soon exposed a well-known scam; to give a sample example, consider this link:
https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2018/04/11/scam-own-phone-number-calls/ (This is over and beyond common sense facts like you can't call yourself from your own phone.)
I've myself been exposed to 2 similar scams, which I hadn't heard of before, but I'm exposing as a warning to others:
- One of these was somewhat ingenious in my context because in the past I have worked on federal contracts requiring government background investigations. In 2014, I was up for a Q clearance (Department of Energy), which had dragged on for months, a prerequisite for a contingent job offer for a subcontracting gig via Bechtel in Pittsburgh. (I eventually took an offer from South Carolina.)
Now I had been contacted by an investigator/point of contact; she had identified herself, and there were ways to verify she was a legitimate contact. (I have occasionally written about elements of this process. She interviewed me personally at a fast food place (originally it was supposed to be at a library but it was closed on that day) for it must have been 90 minutes or more over my 60-page or so background paperwork. Then I got a phone call, apparently in response to an interview with my landlady, where she learned my first week in WV I had booked a room at a local hotel at my personal expense, not reimbursed. (I actually signed a lease my first day on the job, but it took a week to get Internet service set up, a requirement for my contractor employer). So the investigator accused me of a material omission in my background report, which was a joke; she claimed she needed to interview the hotel manager about me. (Could you imagine if this had followed my road warrior days where I spent innumerable days in a wide variety of hotels?) Then an investigator (in name only) had accusingly reported back that my reported headquarters for a prior employer in 2009-2010 was vacant. Apparent I, with the assistance of Google, discovered they lost their key contract recompete, and I found the CEO's resume on LinkedIn, showing the company folded in 2012.
So I got this weird recorded voicemail (at least 3 times" with a weird ominous comically loud blurb of "Federal Investigation", saying that investigators were attempting to get in touch with me (although there was no personal reference to me, a specific investigator or a phone number I could vet the source)). I couldn't reverse trace the target phone number, so it likely wasn't a government number. But the message was coincidental because there were legitimate reasons an investigator could be reaching out to me (beyond the scope of this post). So I did call back once, and almost immediately, it came up as phony. It sounded like this guy was in a scam boiler room. He claimed that he needed my social security number to identify the investigator assigned to my case, that that was their standard operating procedure. I knew this was bullshit, and my scammer alert went on overdrive; I hung up and reported it to an employer representative.
- I guess after their initial attempts didn't work, they or others started a new attempt, this time reportedly from the social security administration, claiming my social security number account had been suspended over suspicion of fraudulent use. I could call the (boiler room) number for more details. It does take chutzpah for a scammer to hype concerns of social security fraud as a ruse to collect social security numbers. This was so obviously a scam I never even bothered to make a call. (I will point out I periodically check on my social security account, and I have configured alerts.)
So, summarizing, be suspicious of calls, emails, etc., purporting to be from the government. A legitimate government official will NEVER use you for PII; if there is a need to know, they have alternative access without coming to you. If an official contacts you, there should be an independent verification of this official from official sources.
Let's be clear: parasitic thieves victimizing the elderly, often on limited, fixed incomes, is a violation against the natural right of property; it's morally outrageous.
My Pet Peeve Against (Asian) Indian Recruiters Continues
I'm sure that many reading this heading will suspect a "racist" motivation. I could point out some of my best friends in the IT profession have been Indian. (But it comes across as defensive, sort of like "some of my best friends are black".) I don't identify friends and relatives in my blog, especially without their knowledge and permission.
But I have previously mentioned RN. Back in 1999, I was recruited by an agency as a temp resource from the Chicago area to work a bridge 5-week or so subcontract role to fill in for their DBA who had resigned (and the Santa Clara company was in a state of denial about the market value of DBAs). Originally the contracting company was holding out for a bargain-basement rate. I would later befriend RN, a systems analyst then a H1B seeking his green card. He would later tell me how he ended up having to find his new gig after his prior gigs (including one with Cisco had expired); our client was paying a bargain-basement rate for him, and our company (I was a subcontractor and he was perm) responded by cutting his pay and/or promised bonus. (To this day, I am revolted by the exploitation of H1Bs by their sponsor.) I think the former DBA and his female accounting manager friend, both Filipino immigrants I believe, disliked RN with a passion; my first week on the job, RN was at some training facility in another state, and the DBA, (Vince) transitioning me at the end of his 2-week notice, routinely badmouthed RN behind his back. I don't know the whole story, but apparently Vince had quit because he wasn't named to the vacant IT manager position and that he had promised the accountant a spot (as systems analyst?) on his team.
There is a whole soap opera over what happened next. The rumor is that Vince got fired on his new consulting job by his second day for lying about his experience on his resume. I had soon discovered that the company's ERP (Oracle EBS) system was literally years behind in compliance patches, and the accountants were continuing to work in green screen/character mode , which Oracle had desupported some 6 months earlier. So I aggressively pushed for compliance patching. Susan (the accounting manager) would try to blame every new tech issue on my patching, totally oblivious that Oracle would not support a system out of patch compliance. One minor example is the patching had overwritten a custom check with a generic one, something that literally took less than 15 minutes to fix.
In the interim SS, a former Tyco IT manager, had come on board as the new IT manager, and RN and I were his proteges. RN became his new project manager, and one of the first things SS did was to fire a consulting effort headed by a former company manager from their former Buffalo Grove, IL (Chicago NW suburb) headquarters on a Clarify implementation. The project had achieved no progress over the prior 8 months despite high costs. Basically RN and I (with some contractor developers) achieved more in 3 months what they did in 8. But the former manager used his contacts at our Japan owner headquarters to appeal the termination and particularly SS. It ultimately failed.
Susan had used her influence (the controller at that point was SS's boss) to get Vince rehired. Now SS had been privately trying to get me to come on perm, but the fact is I had a standard clause in my contract saying the clients couldn't hire me for at least 6 months after the end of my work assignment. Of course, everything is negotiable if the company was willing to part with a substantial finder's fee. But I had no intention of waiting 6 months without pay for a new offer. So I basically sidestepped SS' overtures. Besides, I had ZERO interest in moving to California.
So SS, as a concession to his new boss, agreed to rehire; I personally was pissed that Vince had done ZERO to get us into patch compliance and opposed the rehire--but I knew the bridge contract was soon to expire. SS wanted me to stay in charge of the EBS database because of recent patching in the interim, which infuriated Vince. (Vince would later claim he wanted to do patching, but his bosses had refused.) At some point, Vince and Susan started a rumor that I claimed that SS was trying to hire me perm. There was absolutely no truth to the rumor (I mean, yes, Steve had flirted with hiring me, but I never told anyone--and I wasn't interested in the job.) I had specifically told Vince I expected to be rolled off later that month, and everything would be transitioning to him. But SS was absolutely livid at me, fully buying into the false rumor, claiming that I had sabotaged his effort to hire me perm.
And then Vince suddenly resigned less than 2 weeks into his rehire. It seems that his prior employer had offered him a job with stock options. (Recall this was 1999..) Susan would later blame me for the fact Vince resigned his job again.
RN would later tell me that he was the one who had picked out my resume and championed my hiring. SS would later make me the "job offer by extortion" several weeks later. I was about to leave for my Friday night SFO flight to Chicago when SS told me not to bother coming back Monday if I didn't accept a perm job offer then and there; let's be clear. I had nothing else lined up for Monday; as much as I hate California, I hated unemployment more. I pointed out that I had a contract and they could sue me for breach. He laughed and said he had leverage. (In essence, the contractors had stupidly invoiced the client for less than my own rate, never mind travel expenses. So they would lose massively if Steve simply paid off the invoices.) Of course, my contractor employers went batshit crazy; "Benedict Arnold' was one of the tamer things they called me. But if Steve had ended the contract, they would have fired me in a split second. And the fact is that I had extended a 5-week contract to 3 months of billing.
RN and I did some incredible things in a skeleton IT department of about 15 people for a multi-million dollar company. I sometimes joked we were like the Lennon-McCartney of Oracle. He busted the hype saying that he had done some amazing things with others as well. We frequented one of his favorite Indian buffets in nearby Sunnyvale. He was quite passionate about his political beliefs, in particularly on Kashmir and Pakistan's Musharraf, whom he despised.
When my former contractor got acquired, SS hopes that RN would get lost in the shuffle, but they soon reassigned RN to a project near San Francisco with a better billing rate. SS was openly threatening suing them (he was willing to raise the rate, on the condition RN get all the increase, but that wasn't going to happen); I was afraid SS threatened RN's position, just as he was nearing the home stretch of his green card.
RN had served as a buffer between Steve and me. I was working long hours (like 70 hours a week), my fitness club (Bally's) then had no local locations and my weight got to around 300 lbs. Steve was writing checks on my back; he had resurrected a Web Expenses project in November, a 6-month project, for go-live in late January; while I was on a brief holiday visit home in Texas, MT called me and said SS had told them (out for training other branches in early January) to start filing their expense reports in production. In other words, he had unilaterally moved forward go-live 3 weeks before our negotiated go-live date. I didn't even have the software installed in production. Not to mention he was supposed to transition managers to a new email system, but as a political concession had agreed to allow a 6-month delay. Now that might sound "reasonable", but the email domain was different depending on the product; the wrong email address meant the manager didn't get notifications and the notifications would get lost in the system. Now if you didn't know, expense reimbursements can get very political; employees are very sensitive about prompt reimbursement. Steve just had a habit of doing very risky things without advising me. I literally overheard him telling a fellow manager to submit his expense report to the CEO, and I'm literally running to my cubicle to check the CEO's email address in the database.
I had developed a stress-induced cough my Mom had noticed and nagged me into checking with clueless doctors (one claimed I was recovering from a cold). (I didn't even know there was such a thing as a stress-induced cough.) More worrisome to me, I have a decent singing voice (I was in my high school choir), but I literally found my vocal range cut down to like 2 or 3 notes; my voice would literally go silent outside that narrow range. I didn't know what was going on, and it was scaring the crap out of me. Note: 2 weeks after I finally resigned, the cough disappeared, and my singing voice was back to normal.
When RN left, I got a full dose of Steve, and it was driving me crazy. I had scheduled an in-person job interview for an Austin-based real estate portal (I had been trying for years to get a job back in Texas) when my boss suffered a heart attack at a Vermont branch. (He had earlier admitted to me he had had heart incidents/attacks (?) and swore me to secrecy.) If I had left then, it would have been a disaster for the company. So I canceled the Austin visit (and they never forgave me). Steve gave me a raise in May plus a bonus spread out over 6 months, to give me an incentive to stay, but I ended up resigning 2 months later.
RN got his green card some time after I had left and immediately accepted Steve's offer. At this point, Steve was reporting directly to the CEO. I remember I asked him if he planned to become a citizen, and he responded with an irate rant "Why does everybody ask me that?" A few years later, he casually mentioned in an email that he had been sworn in as a US citizen. I said, "Rahul, why didn't you tell me? I would have flown in to be there."
I don't know the specifics but Steve started running into political issues at the company. He was no longer reporting to the CEO, and the rumor was he stopped coming into work on a normal schedule. RN was named acting manager, and Steve considered him a Benedict Arnold. Ultimately Steve left the company, and RN was named the permanent IT manager, and the last time we emailed he was still there. I think they had just gone through a merger. (The company makes and services chip-testing equipment.)
Now RN was different than a lot of Indians I've worked with. At the risk of oversimplification, this summarizes some of my experiences:
- Indians tend to be highly sensitive over losing face, e.g., not wanting to be seen as making a mistake or don't understand something or a task is beyond their current skills, knowledge or experience. They want to tell you what they think you want to hear. Now quite often to resolve an issue you want to know a status directly rather than having to navigate around a person's defensiveness.
- Communicating is often what I analogize as having to thread a needle. It's difficult to describe, but you get a response which is inconsistent with the context, possibly related to my first point. I have bragged as a professor, I could often ask the same test question 6 different ways. It can be exhausting having to constantly rephrase things until my point gets across. It's exhausting work. Yes, they speak English, but not American English, which many Americans find frustrating with help desk support from India. I once asked RN why I found it much easier to converse with him, and he said, "Dude, I had been working with Americans and others for 15 years before moving to the US."
- They can be cliquish. There are several examples from a few Indian-American owned companies or managers in my experience. There have been co-workers who would report to Indian managers behind my back. Let me give a couple of examples. When I was a contractor DBA at National Archives, I had to share passwords with an Indian developer who served as my backup of sorts. Once he sent me with his password list and demanded that I review and correct any, as if I was his goddamn secretary. I effectively said, "Dude! It is your responsibility to maintain and check your password list. If you run into a problem, let me know, and I'll give you the correct one." (I always communicated changes but had no control over what they did/didn't do with them.) He didn't like that and filed a complaint. A second example I've probably posted elsewhere involving my last project with IBM. Our business unit included a team of commodity novice "DBAs" in Bangalore. Basically I had to take an unconventional EBS implementation by a prior management consultancy, a de facto poison pill, not to mention no patching in 18 months. The fact of the matter was my Indian boss RK was totally clueless about what the status quo was; their basic migration was from cookie cutter implementation. What I had to do was redesign things like doing a crossword puzzle in ink, never mind Oracle certainly would not have certified what I inherited, maybe even my efforts to get us back on track. So my boss demanded that the client and their current consultants patch the EBS, which was laughably never going to happen. So I'm working the migration from hell and we should have billed the customer a fortune for what I was doing. When all was said and done, though, the freaking DBA manager in India was pissed I hadn't delegated enough billable cookie cutter tasks and so was going to refuse supporting the client's database. I would have fired that son of a bitch for cause so fast his head would spin. But to give examples of Indian performance issues on this side of the pond: the designated "project manager" had not secured production server resources (in Arizona) literally less than a week before "go live". So I'm having to agitate for resources. And even when I get them, they haven't been deployed correctly. I'm finding overnight a tape file dump only amounted to 38MB overnight; file transfers between servers is taking forever. So I'm literally having to order courier transport of computer media, escalate things like the system and network admins. The guy who reported only 38MB: think he's going to escalate the issue on his own? Of course not. Finally, and I've mentioned this in earlier posts, my Indian developer colleague near client facilities in Florida was planning to work remotely from home a few miles away. I personally asked him 2-3 times if he had tested connections, and he didn't respond. So he was responsible for doing a number of QC checks after I finish my work. So I work like hell to get things done by Saturday noon and call him to start his part. Um, he calls back saying he can't connect. IBM has a skeleton shift working on weekends. I urge him to go to the facility. (Hello, contingency planning? What the hell is that?) "No, I'm not on the list. Can you call your client manager? No, I'm not going to do that; it can wait until Monday." Are you freaking kidding me? He just blew off 2 days in a go-live schedule. People have been fired over lesser things. But let me leave this discussion with my amiable ex-boss RK. During my earlier efforts doing a test migration, the database crashed with complications is recovery. Long story short, the Unix system manager discovers his employee violated his department's standards in deploying storage. So the son of a bitch, looking for a convenient scapegoat to blame, tries to blame ME for not reviewing what HIS employee is doing. And RK AGREES with him. Say, what? I didn't deploy storage against standard. The Unix admin doesn't report to me; those are not MY standards to enforce. Under what Alice in Wonderland universe does this become my responsibility?
There are lots of other examples; my deal taking me back to Illinois included coverage of relocation; I used the same movers as my Indian developer colleague (who had earlier moved from California). The Indian VP exploded when he saw the bill (which was $3K less than my move to CA), and threatened not to pay, arguing I had been swindled. This is the same dude who had demanded, 2 days before I was scheduled to move over the weekend, demanding that I do a test upgrade over the coming week (not even part of the contract). I had no choice but to cancel my trip home. Not to mention the landlord had already rented out my apartment, I had to reschedule movers, car transport, flights, etc.Not only that but the local county was hosting the state fair, and I had no reservations (I've also discussed this in past posts.) Not to mention another Indian company hired me to work in MD (National Archives) and refused to repay my moving expenses as agreed on, because I didn't submit my receipts fast enough.
I could go on and on, talking about interviews staffed entirely by Indians, never winning a bid from an Indian staffing agency, etc. It's tough bidding against someone living out of a suitcase.
So in summary there are challenges in working with Indians. I'm not necessarily claiming that my experiences are generalizable. To see an alternative consideration, see
here.
As for my experience with Indian recruiters, just to give a sample of pet peeves:
- too high-maintenance. I've literally had over a dozen contacts over short periods of time. It's generally not worth my time and effort.
- too much busy work: whether we are talking skill matrices or the same goddamn lists of questions,including location, email, phone, prospective relocation date, rate requirement, LinkedIn link, Skype ID, etc. Most of these are in the resume they have.
- the haggling after an agreement. After we come to a settlement on rate, they call back saying it's not doable and want to chop off $10-15/hour off the rate.
- communication issues (see above)
- cold or near cold calls. I often see a Gmail notification as or after getting an unsolicited call.
- too many unacceptable gigs. I will not consider the West Coast, IL or the NE. I've been a DBA for 25 years; I'm not likely to be considered for other, less experienced gigs
Almost 80% of the job emails I get are from Indian recruiters. The vast majority are inapplicable. I sometimes think it's a form of harassment. If you are an Indian recruiter, it's highly unlikely I will respond to your email or return your call. But no matter how many times I unsubscribe or whatever, they still come. Could it be former bosses or colleagues with an ax to grind? Maybe. I'm annoyed it takes a split second to delete an email or voicemail.
I know there are a number of good Indians like RN. I have worked or studied with a number of good people from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. But I've given some examples of challenges I've had with others.
BEB Update
My former UH office mate, fellow PhD student is recovering from a massive stroke in early June. I've been summarizing salient elements from his spouse Susan in a CaringBridge blog.
Bruce still hasn't progressed to eating a normal diet, in part presumably to some swallowing issues. He's had a persistent issue tolerating his nutritional formulas, and it's sometimes manifested itself in vomiting or related issues during physical therapy. He has also experienced some issues with prescribed medications. Quite often he's frustrated with his limitations. He's doing well with cognitive and communication issues and is building endurance in standing and other physical therapy.
