The FTC Stakes a Vampire through the Heart

There was a foul, blood-sucking creature stalking the land, preying on the innocent and the naive, draining the life from the elderly and the infirm. This creature stole into the homes of the vulnerable, with soothing words and false promises, only to latch onto the throats of its victims and suck them dry. But a brave woman tracked this foul demon back to its lair in a dank swamp and staked it through the heart.

No, I'm not talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm talking about Jessica Rich, director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection. At the request of Rich and the Florida Attorney General, the US District Court, Orlando Division has frozen the assets of Credit Voice, the company behind a scam to defraud the elderly and annoy the hell out of anyone with phone.

Credit Voice inundated the country with robocalls. The one we got the most was some guy shuffling through papers said something like, "Hi, it looks like someone in your family ordered you this medical alert monitor. They already paid for it, so press 1 to arrange delivery."

It was all a lie, of course: the real service provider, Medical Alert, gives the monitor away because they make out like bandits on monthly fees. Credit Voice would start charging the victims immediately, whether the device was activated or not. The scammers have received $13 million in commissions since March, 2012. The court has ordered restitution, but good luck with that. Credit Voice will declare bankruptcy any day now, and the principles will abscond to some island tax haven.

I'm extremely glad the calls have stopped., but this took an awfully long time to resolve. We would get this call two, three, four times a day for months on end.  I went to the FTC's Do Not Call website, made sure we were on the list, and reported the calls. When that didn't stop them, I seriously considered canceling my landline just to avoid these completely illegal robocalls. A year ago North Dakota issued Elite Infosystems (one of Credit Voice's aliases) and Michael Hilgar (the scumbag behind this scam) a cease and desist order to stop making fraudulent robocalls. The authorities have known about these bastards for a long time, but it took two years to shut them down.

The company that may be ultimately responsible for this fraud is Medical Alert, because they appear to have paid Credit Voice a commission while turning a blind eye to the scammers' methods. Medical Alert provides a device -- free of charge! -- that hooks into your landline. They give you a waterproof button on a wristband or pendant. You press the button if you fall down and can't get up. (Falling an extremely common proximate cause of death in the elderly.) The button signals the device hooked into the landline, which calls Medical Alert. They call you back to hold your hand and find out if you really need 911 service. All for the low-low price of just $29.95 a month (plus the cost of your landline).

That sounds kind of pricey for something with such limited utility. For not much more you can get a mobile phone that you can use for all sorts of things, including calling 911 and GPS tracking. Calling 911 yourself has the advantage of not having to wait for an operator making minimum wage or working in a foreign country to call you back. And I've got to wonder: if you've fallen down and broken your hip how will you get up to answer the phone? If you've fallen because you've lost consciousness from low blood pressure, diabetic shock, stroke or heart attack, you won't be able to press the button in the first place. And if you fall while taking your daily constitutional in the park, you're out of range of the device and it's useless.

I have a hard time believing these devices are all that useful. One purportedly helped Daniel Schorr, the veteran newsman, who had a similar system from Philips Lifeline. But the account of his accident highlights the limitations of these systems: if Schorr had fallen unconscious after hitting his head, he wouldn't have pressed the button. If his wife hadn't been there to answer the phone, the emergency response would have been delayed while the operator called around to ensure it wasn't a false alarm. And Schorr had a wife, who would have found him within minutes when he didn't come down for breakfast.

Don't get me wrong. I think there's a need for something like this. The elderly population of the United States is growing. People do better physically and psychologically if they stay in their own homes rather than being warehoused in nursing facilities. Independent living is cheaper, even when the elderly require in-home services like housecleaning, medical monitoring and meals. Technology is an obvious solution to monitor their well-being at a lower cost.

But the Medical Alert system doesn't seem to be the answer: it's a half-assed kludge that takes a big monthly bite out of an elderly person's Social Security check. A better solution would be a small, rugged, GPS-equipped, water-proof mobile phone that charges by induction, so that the phone can simply be placed on charger by the bedside at night (the elderly have a hard time plugging in tiny USB connections). It needs a 911 call button on the front. It should be able to monitor pulse and respiration, and blood sugar levels for diabetics. It should detect falls and conditions like heart attack, stroke, and diabetic coma, and call 911 automatically.

Do systems like Medical Alert save cities and counties money by vetting distress calls from the elderly? Or is it just another big-business ripoff of the elderly, at best preying on their fear and charging them 30 bucks a month for a false sense of security, and at worst delaying emergency responders who would get there faster with a direct 911 call?