Why an Absurd Prank Call about Comcast Worked

Catching up on my podcast listening, I just heard last week’s episode of Reply All, a show about the Internet.  The focus of this episode is a prank telephone call that seemed to come from Comcast.  The prankster represented herself as a Comcast representative and threatened the Comcast customer that Comcast would fine him or disconnect his service if he did not remove some hostile tweets he had posted expressing dissatisfaction with that service.   The prank worked; he removed a hostile tweet, but when the prankster upped the ante and tried to get him to remove more tweets, he hung up.

Two takeaways:

1.  Adults make prank calls, and they are very sophisticated.  They can fool your caller i.d., and as a result they can fool you.  This is just sad and obnoxious, but the bigger concern is that the same techniques can be used to steal your identity.  Probably best at this point in our relationship with technology to never answer your phone.

2. The prank worked because, as we have reported about repeatedly, companies now do try to prevent customers from posting negative reviews on social media, and it is completely credible that a large media company like Comcast would empower itself to discipline customers in this way.  For the record, as Reply All showed, Comcast does not do so.  

But they could.  

But they don’t.  

But they could, or at least they could try to do so and thus chill people into keeping mum about how much they hate Comcast or TimeWarner or AT&T or Verizon or Sprint or T-Mobile or . . . .