After driving the same vehicle for seventeen years, Curmie
finally got a new car a little over a month ago. It happens to be a Nissan, which is relevant
here only to the extent of identifying who is not responsible for the
slimy tactics described below.
A couple of weeks after buying the new car, Curmie got a
letter, pretty much purporting to be from Nissan, proclaiming that they’d been
trying to contact me to tell me that my warranty was going to be cancelled
unless I called them to confirm. N.B.,
“cancelled,” implying this was coverage I already had was in danger of losing. Curmie got another such letter a couple of
days later. And then there were even more…
Luckily, the stench of scam was pretty obvious. No, they hadn’t been trying to contact me, or
they would have done so. Nissan has not
only my home address, but my email address and cell phone number. They also, of course, have my VIN number,
which two of the letters wanted me to be prepared to tell them. These epistles stopped just short of claiming
to be from Nissan per se; it was implied but never outright stated. There was, of course, a general “you must act
now” feel, and the obligatory ”this is the FINAL ATTEMPT TO CONTACT YOU”
bullshit.
Ultimately, Curmie has (so far!) received seven (!) such
letters, apparently from at least four different fraudsters (or at least four different
numbers to call), all claiming to be the FINAL ATTEMPT to contact me. (Curmie says “at least four” because the last
one was pitched, unopened.) Only one admitted
they wanted to sell me new coverage rather than have me “confirm” an allegedly already
existing account. One version was completely
identical to the first one except for a change of deadline date. Perhaps that first one wasn’t really the
final attempt, after all, huh? Luckily,
the villains are as stupid as they are corrupt.
Exactly how all of these creatures got Curmie’s home address
and found out about his purchase is unclear.
The salesman at the local dealership said perhaps they hacked into the
DMV, but it’s more likely the DMV cheerfully sold the information: the state
has got to make money somehow, and they’re unwilling to make billionaires and
oil companies pay taxes at an appropriate rate, so allowing their citizens to
be swindled seems an appropriate way to make a few bucks.
The problem is neither new nor limited to one brand of
vehicle or one location. Beloved Spouse
is still occasionally getting this crap for a Honda she bought two years
ago. Incidentally, the Honda dealership,
the Nissan dealership, and Curmie’s house are in three different counties, so it’s
got to be a state-wide (at least) phenomenon.
But here’s the thing: Curmie is a skeptical lad by nature,
and even he was almost tempted to call one of those numbers just to find out
what was going on. Partly, that impulse
was driven by the perhaps naïve belief that scam artists would have nothing to
gain if he was sufficiently cautious on the phone. Indeed, it wasn’t until he got the second
letter—from an apparently different source—that Curmie’s suspicions went from
“preponderance of the evidence” to “beyond reasonable doubt.” Even then, a quick call to the dealership seemed
in order.
It’s unclear how this little exercise in deceit works to the
scammers’ benefit if the car owner is cautious.
Still, we can suspect that this kind of shadiness must have the
potential to be lucrative or there wouldn’t be so many people trying it, and whereas
the victims might not be the sharpest knives in the proverbial drawer, they
don’t deserve to be swindled.
Even more instantly identifiable as deceit is the advertising
for the UpSide app. Back when the app
was relatively new, Curmie pointed out that you could have a full-time job driving 65 mph with no breaks and still not
get the savings the ad promises. They’ve
changed the details of their strategy a little, but the bullshit remains. The most recent commercial Curmie heard opens
with an ominous voice proclaiming that the average American spends $5000 a year
on gas. “That’s crazy,” quoth the
narrator. That’s true, it is crazy: in
the sense that you’d be crazy to believe such an outright lie.
Let’s see: the average car gets about 24.4 mpg,
and the average person drives about 12,200 miles a year. That means they’d need almost exactly 500
gallons of gas a year. The average price
of gas nationally is about $3.17 a gallon [https://gasprices.aaa.com/],
but let’s go with the most expensive state, California, where the average cost
is $4.65 (these figures are apparently updated daily, so they might not be
exact if/when you check, Gentle Reader).
That would mean that even in California you’d be spending about $2325 on
gas annually: less than half what the UpSide ad claims. In Mississippi, the cheapest state for gas, the
cost would be about $1350: roughly a third of UpSide’s stat.
The app itself may actually be a good thing: Curmie can find
nothing to suggest that it doesn’t, in fact, save the user some money, nor is
there evidence of hidden charges or even hassles. If it’s a scam, it’s difficult to see how the
operation works. But if you’re not
trying to fleece someone, why would you go out of your way to act like you are?
Curmie shrugs and moves on.
No comments:
Post a Comment