Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

The Problem with Student Loan Forgiveness(And What Should Be Done)

1.5 trillion dollars
That’s the key figure plastered on every editorial headline as a sign of how bad the student debt crisis has become in America. It’s also the number quoted in S.Res 7.11 which calls for the President to use his executive authority to forgive 50,000 dollars in student loan debt for all Federal Student Loan Borrowers. This resolution has suddenly become relevant again following an interview with Senate Minority Leader Schumer in which he claims that implementing this resolution will be a priority of Biden’s first 100 days.

I have a proposal with Elizabeth Warren that the first 50,000 of debt be vanquished, and we believe that Joe Biden can do that with the pen as opposed to the legislation.

The purpose of this effortpost is to explain why this policy, and student loan forgiveness, in general, is extremely regressive and benefits the upper-middle class more than anyone else.
The Student Debt Crisis
First, we need to understand the true nature of the crisis. It’s no secret that educational debt has soared over time, tripling since 2006 . At 1.5 trillion dollars, they are now the second largest form of consumer debt outside of mortgages, exceeding credit cards and auto loans. The most common reason given for this is an increase in the sticker price for college, which has similarly doubled in the same time period. However, what these raw figures neglect to account for is price discrimination, the concept where sellers charge consumers the maximum price they can afford. In fact, at private 4-year colleges, net tuition has remained stagnant the past 3 decades largely as a result of scholarships, grants, and need-based financial aid all of which have greatly increased over time.
Graph showing increase in net price at private 4-year colleges
Public schools show a greater increase, however, their change in tuition has been fairly progressive. Since 1990, students in the lowest income quartile have paid an annual net price of zero dollars. In the second quartile, tuition has remained roughly stagnant, and the majority of the gains lie on the upper quartiles. This amounts to an increase of 26% since 2006, a far cry from the 100% increase in the sticker price.
Graph showing increase in net price at public colleges, separated by income quariles
So why has college debt been skyrocketing then? The short answer is for-profit schools, upper-income kids, more borrowers, and graduate schools. More useful information can be gleaned from looking at borrowing statistics.
Since 2007, the number of borrowers has increased by 50%, from 28 to 43 million. Average debt by borrower has also increased by 50%. However, average borrowing conditional on the recipient earning a bachelor’s degree from a non-profit school has only increased 14% in a similar timeframe. Borrowing conditional on the recipient receiving a graduate degree on the other hand has jumped up 55%. Looking at a graph showing average annual borrowing for active borrowers since the 1970s shows the stark divergence between undergraduate and graduate loans. In 1970, both groups borrowed roughly the same amount. Undergraduate borrowing has since steadily crept up, while graduate borrowing exploded, and is now three times as high as the other.
Default rates also provide some insight. The default rate within 5 years for students who attend for-profit schools is 33%, compared to 14% for public universities and 13% for private ones .This horrifying statistic would seem to suggest many of these for-profit universities are low-quality institutions bordering on fraud. Stopping lending for students to attend this insitutions is the lowest of low hanging fruit.
What conclusions can we draw from all of these numbers? Well firstly, the growth in student debt is not driven by the rapidly increasing cost of an undergraduate degree. Instead, graduate students(who are actually borrowing more than ever), an increase in the number of students(who again, aren’t borrowing a substantially increased amount of money) and for-profit schools are to blame. With that out of the way, we can move on to the most popular solution for the crisis, broad student loan forgiveness, and its distributional effects.
Effects of Student Loan Forgiveness
Firstly, let’s look at the income distribution of student loans, taken from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Outstanding debt is highly concentrated at the upper-income levels, with the top quintile carrying 26% of the total and the bottom only 5%. The numbers get even worse when looking at the share of monthly payments.
The bottom 40% make only 10% of the payments, while the top 40% are responsible for 73%. Additionally, people with graduate degrees bear 56% of the total debt. Student debt forgiveness would overwhelmingly favor highly educated, upper-income households. Again, only 10% of the benefits would go to the bottom 40%. The majority is going to doctors, lawyers, and MBAs, a group of people who on average make over 750,000 dollars more than bachelor’s degree holders over the course of their career. If helping the working and middle class is the goal, broad student loan forgiveness does not fit the bill.
A Better Way Forward - Income-Driven Repayment
Now, please don’t mistake this post as claiming that there is nothing that should be done. There exists a very real problem for drop-outs, who bear all the burdens of student loans without any of the benefits of a college education. There exists a very real problem for students who attended for-profit schools the majority of which provide no statistically significant boost to earnings or emploment. There exists a very real problem for people who took out loans to attend untested online programs that have offered no labor market value. These issues are best described by this quote

There is no debt crisis: student debt levels are not large relative to the estimated payoff to a college education in the US. Rather, there is a repayment crisis, with student loans paid when borrowers’ earnings are lowest and most variable.As a result, there is a mismatch in the timing of the arrival of the benefits of college and its costs

Ironically, this mismatch in timing is the very issue student loans were trying to solve. The solution? An Income-Driven Repayment system, where monthly payments are set depending on the borrower’s income.Under the Revised Pay as You Earn (REPAYE) plan , borrowers pay 10 percent of their discretionary income (income minus 150 percent of the poverty line) for 20 years (25 years if a graduate borrower). Any remaining balance is forgiven. REPAYE exists currently, however it suffers from default bias, as the system is so complicated few students switch to it from the automatically selected Fixed Repayment plan. REPAYE should be the default repayment plan, and all borrowers should be immediately converted to this plan.Universal and automatic REPAYE would address many of the problems with student loans today, and would by incredibly progressive. Enrollment in IDRs has been proven to

Reduce delinquency
Improve credit scores
And increase rates of homeownership

Chart showing the effects of automatic REPAYE
Unlike broad student loan forgiveness, IDRs specifically target and benefit low-income earners. For the bottom quintile, payments shrink from 14% of income to 0%. For the second quintile payments go from 7% to 1%, and from 5% to 3% after that. Only the top 40% pay more under REPAYE, and those with higher earnings potential are more likely to opt out of the system anyway.
To improve the system, REPAYE should offer more substantial interest subsidies for borrowers whose payments don’t cover accruing interest. Currently, the government pays 100 percent of unpaid interest that accrues on subsidized loans in the first three years of repayment, and 50 percent of unpaid interest that accrues on subsidized loans after the first three years and on unsubsidized loans during all periods. Because subsidized loans are only available to borrowers with financial need, and because the loan subsidies would only apply in periods of hardship, expanding interest subsidies on those loans are likely to be progressive based both on their family income and their own earnings.
As for the millions of existing borrowers who never opted into REPAYE, actions should be taken to protect them as well.Voiding the fees, capitalized interest, and collection costs imposed on legacy borrowers, who would have never incurred those costs in a REPAYE system, would go a long way. Additionally, debts that are older than 20 years (or 25 years) should be forgiven. These actions would be similarly progressive.
Chart showing the distributional effects of the aforementioned actions
Note, only 9% of the benefits of forgiving excess interest and fees go to the top quintile, compared to 28% going to the bottom. The results of forgiving old balances are even more progressive, with only 3% of the benefits doing to the top quintile and 86%(!) going to the bottom 20%.
Comparing the distributional effects of the plans I mentioned
Counterarguments
For this final section, I want to address a couple popular arguments for student loan forgiveness.
1: It would be a massive boost to the economy! Giving over 1 trillion dollars to students would be an incredibly effective stimulus.
Yes, it is true that forgiving student debt would be a huge boost to the economy. But so would forgiving credit card debt. Or mortgages. Or automobile debt, or medical debt. The key difference with student loans is that degree holders make nearly 1 million dollars more than non-degree holders over the course of their career . If an effective stimulus is the goal, it should go mainly to those who have a higher marginal propensity to consume ,ie, low-income workers. Student debt forgiveness would be a horribly designed stimulus.
2:Student loans are destroying the younger generations homeownership rates!
More adults between 18 and 35 are living at home, and home ownership rates have been decreasing over the past two decades. However these trends are mostly due to people entering the workforce during the Great Recessio. As per the Fed, only about 20% of the decline can be blamed on student loans
3: Forgiving student loans is great politics! People will never forget the party which freed them of their debt!
This is the only point I can't speak authoritatively on. There is probably some merit to this line of thinking, however the opportunity cost of the program is so massive it can’t be ignored. With 1 trillion dollars the government could fully fund
A 50,000 dollar income tax exemption for single people, and 100,000 for married couples
Universal Pre-K
Scholarships for service, 2 years of tuition free public college in exchange for one year of national service
Universal mental health care and therapy
..as well as basically any other policy anybody can think of. Would student loan forgiveness provide more goodwill than all of those combined? It's impossible to say, but it seems extremely unlikely.
There are many flaws with the current state of our student lending system. However, this requires carefully targeted policy and not ineffective, regressive student loan forgiveness. I hope this post was somewhat informative, and thanks for reading.
References:
https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/highlights
https://trends.collegeboard.org/student-aid
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_tub.pdf
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/11/12/five-facts-about-student-loans
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors
http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2018/01/31/jhr.54.2.1016.8302R1.abstrac
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/17rppostsecondaryedtaxbenefits.pdf
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/economist_perspective_student_loans_dynarski.pdf
https://www.nber.org/papers/w25258
http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/Education_2018/herbst_d26912.pdf
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160718_cea_student_debt.pd
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/consumer-community-context-201901.pdf
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgireferer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=4621&context=ylj
https://www.brookings.edu/research/do-we-already-have-universalpreschool/#:~:text=We%20find%20that%20the%20additional,to%20achieve%20Preschool%20for%20All
https://www.brookings.edu/essay/a-new-contract-with-the-middle-class
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0027950107086171
EDIT: This post was made a couple days before student loan forgiveness broke into the mainstream discourse again. Since then, economists who are way more qualified than me have spoken, and it turns out forgiveness is a much better stimulus than I implied. I was wrong, please ignore that portion of this post.

I am 24 years old, live off savings and go to Medical School (preclinical) in Wisconsin

I am currently living off accrued savings and funding my schooling. When I exhaust those funds, I will transition to loans. I have an incredible place of privilege as someone without undergrad debt, and parent-provided health insurance. PSA: I have an autoimmune disorder so I am pretty home-bound with COVID.
Assets and Debt
Retirement Balance: $1610 in a Target Date Fund.
Saving + Checking account balance: $47900. I pay my tuition at the end of the month which eat up ~20k of this.
Credit card debt (and how you accumulated it): Paid in full every month.
Student loan debt (for what degree): None, coming soon.
Income
Main Job Monthly Take Home:
$0 I do not currently work and live off saved income. I did not receive any scholarships and am unlikely to, as I do not identify as an underrepresented group in medicine. I budget $1200 every month outside of tuition payments which are made biannually.
Side Gig Monthly Take Home
I do surveys and research studies for extra cash (usually about $100 a month).
IF YOU COMBINE INCOME WITH A S/O PLEASE INCLUDE ALL OF THEIR INCOME AS WELL
Last summer I moved in with my SO, L. We do not combine finances, but we do split some costs. L wanted to live in a nicer apartment, but it was outside of my budget. To make up this gap he pays for the internet, electrici/heat, and renters’ insurance. We split groceries/Costco, gas, and eating out (reported below as total monthly expenditures).
Tuition: ~40k a year
Rent: $702.50 (my half, includes pet fee)
Parking: $62.50 (my half)
Retirement contribution: contributed $500 to my Roth in 2020. This is lump sum and I do not regularly contribute.
Donations: I donate $50 every year to the women’s legislation advocacy group I interned with in Uni, I love their mission and WI state politics needs every bit of help it can get.
Electric/Wifi: L pays
Cellphone: On my mom’s business plan
Subscriptions: Spotify/hulu : $5.99 (student rate)
Gym membership: $3.99 (online due to COVID)
Groceries: $200
Costco: ~$100
Gas: $20
Eating out: $150
Car payment / insurance: L pays
Medical Insurance: On my dad’s, thanks ACA! He works in the hospital and has low deductible. As someone who regularly uses their entire deductible, this is invaluable.
Medicine: $15
Dental Insurance: $14.99 with a $90 annual deductible
NYT Subscription: $4
Tuition: $39600/yearly (this increases yearly usually by 3-5k yearly)
Growing up, what kind of conversations did you have about money? Did your parent/guardian(s) educate you about finances?
Yes. My mom was very open about her finances and how everything worked. She came from a working-class family that did not teach her financial well-being and wanted her kids to be well equipped. Additionally, she is a worker’s comp attorney and emphasized supporting businesses that treat their workers well. She was very thrifty, but not afraid to spend on quality food and exposing my sisters and I to cultural things (museums, indie movies, symphonies). I think she taught us a healthy balance of saving, and spending.
Was there an expectation for you to attend higher education? Did you participate in any form of higher education? If yes, how did you pay for it?
Definitely. Both my parents have doctorates and were the first of their families to attend college. College was a given and the discussion was a Masters/etc. My parents divorced when I was quite young. Part of their divorce agreement was my mom forgoing maintenance and instead had my dad fund up to 100k towards my sisters’ and I’s undergrad. This was in 2001 and she thought it would be more than enough. It turns out education costs skyrocketed and amazingly 100k is tight for education now. I knew from a young age I wanted to pursue medicine and that its expensive. I chose an in-state university for undergraduate and worked throughout to save. I took a gap year working in research and kept my part-time waitressing job to save during this time.
What was your first job and why did you get it?
My first job was as a banquet server when I was 15 making $11/hr. This was during the summer and I am pretty sure they skirted childhood labor laws as I would work 13-14 hour days without break coming home with achy feet and pulsing legs. Despite this $11/hr at age 15 was unheard of, so I stayed quiet and bought better shoes.
Did you worry about money growing up?
Yes, but not in the sense of security. My dad was chronically taking my mom to court over lowering his child support payments and this created a lot of anxiety around money and the power dynamics it involved. I had to unlearn these as an adult.
Do you worry about money now?
If I think about how much loans I will be sitting in 2-3 years I get a bit freaked out. When this happens, I remind myself to think long-term, and stick to my budget.
At what age did you become financially responsible for yourself and do you have a financial safety net?
I do not consider myself financially independent. My mom is my financial safety net.
Do you or have you ever received passive or inherited income? If yes, please explain.
I consider my undergraduate being paid a ‘living inheritance.’ My dad also gifted me $1500 when I graduated college, which I put towards medical school applications.
Day 1, Sunday:
9:30am I hear my dog, Val, whining from his crate. It’s Sunday and L and I are a bit hung over from last night. Yesterday I drank 3 large glasses of red wine and my head is a bag of sand. I get up and let Val out. He is all grunts, stretches, and wags. We go back inside, and I let him up into our bed where he slithers between L and I to sleep. I take his lead and doze.
11am: I wake up for real and make myself a latte. L bought a fancy coffee maker for our new apartment last summer and it single handedly makes my mornings. I turned him into a coffee snob, as my mom turned me. I make eggs and toast while I read the NYT.
1pm I go to Walgreens to pick up my Rx and realize I do not have my new insurance card yet. The tech tells me they can give me a weeks supply for $75 and then reimburse me if I bring the card within a week. I do not think this will be enough time, and I really do not want to pay $75 for 7 pills. I call my dad, little sister, wait 10 mins and try my dad once more. No one picks up. Finally, I remember I have my insurance app on my phone, and I see if they updated card is on there—it is, VICTORY! I thank the tech for her patience and pay ($15). I try to return a Redbox DVD and learn that the box has since been removed from this location. It's Jan 2 and I feel like these unforeseen bumps are a definite foreshadow for the rest of the year. I google the next closest location and get in the car.
1:30pm: As I return the Redbox movie at a grocery store and realize we need Q-tips and grab those too ($1.33). I swing by a local Asian bakery on the ride home and get a BBQ sweet bun for me and coconut bun for L ($2.36).
2:00pm: I scoop up L and Val and we head to the dog park. Val loves the dog park, and it is as close to live entertainment as we get during COVID. Afterward we head to the grocery store ($21.33).
7pm: I had been cooking through Masala and Meatballs by Asha Shivakumar throughout break. Tonight, I am making the Lentil Risotto with Rainbow Chard recipe. I have some left over Obe Ata I use to marinate some chicken legs. L comes back from the gym and we dig in.
Daily Total: $40.02
Day 2:
8:30am: I have my small-group self-directed learning session. I like my group and they are the only classmates I feel I actually know. Almost all our classes have been online and I know maybe 25 of my class of >150. We discuss health care costs and inefficiency of the US healthcare system. I resent my peers for not knowing what a deductible is, or how much an ER visit is, but then check myself as I know if it wasn’t for my disease, I wouldn’t either.
10:30: I meet with a potential mentor for our summer research program. I think she’ll be a good mentor and I love her work.
3pm: My Ulta package has arrived. I grew up as the family Tom Boy and did not have skin routines. Over winter break, I fell to my sister’s peer pressure and ordered a few of “The Ordinary” products. I review the alchemy-like packaging and get excited.
7pm: L goes to the gym and I do yoga. This is something I used to do regularly and have recently, let it die. My disorder can make your joints and limbs stiff and yoga helps. Afterward I begin making dinner. Khao Soi by Half Baked Harvest, but I sub chicken legs and thighs for meatballs. I also bought ingredients for Mango Key Lime pie with a pretzel and Parle-G crust. Both the Khoa Soi and pie turn out delicious, and I am thrilled.
Daily Total: $0
Day 3:
8am-12pm: Lecture. The professors keep it lighter as we transition back into school, discussing food insecurity and the nutrients that make up a balanced meal. My brain is tired, and I am surprised by how quickly my mental stamina dropped over break.
12:30 For lunch this week we are eating leftovers from everything I made last week from Masala and Meatballs. I grab a slice of pizza and the left-over lamb curry and dig in. After discussing balanced diets, I feel a bit guilty about my choice of food, but my mother is Deutsch and her negative views on food waste are ingrained in me.
2:30 It is sunny out for the first time in days, and I decide to take Val on a walk. I put his rubber booties and coat on and listen to a ‘This American Life,’ podcast about a Birds of Paradise feather heist. It is ridiculous, eclectic, and entertaining.
5pm: A package from Gap arrives. My mom surprised ordered me a few things from Gap during their after-Christmas sale. She grew up in a house where she had a few sets of clothes and having her kids well-dressed is a pride point for her. I call her and do a fashion show for her and my sister. We decide what is worthwhile and what I should return.
Daily Total: $0
Day 4
8am: Lecture. We are beginning to dive into the biochem portion of metabolism. I have dreaded this unit as I hated biochem in Uni and it is exactly as bad as I anticipated. The man teaching us is a classic PhD who spends 15 mins going over the minute details of metabolic enzymes and nomenclature. I wonder how this will ever translate to helping my future patients and silently scream.
12:30pm: I eat the rest of the risotto and cut up an avocado. I then make myself a third cup of coffee and check my emails. My blood draw has finally been uploaded to MyChart and I review them. I can finally interpret what my levels mean and it’s empowering! I see that my C3 levels are down and have been declining for a bit. Everything else looks good. I message my Rheumy to see if I should be concerned.
2pm I check my phone as I have been doing all day to see the result of the Georgia senate run-off. I see that, instead, rioters have stormed our capitol --what country am I in? I had planned to be productive this afternoon, but now spend an hour on my phone, scrolling through madness and elevating my nerves.
3pm: Rheumy replies that she would like to have my labs redone. I would rather not do this as new year, new deductible. Additionally, my dads in-network providers are all 1.5 hours away where I grew up. We decide I can complete them in two months when I am back home for different appointment. She is satisfied.
5pm: I do some Anki flashcards. I fought against these until we started the Renal unit and using them made my test score went up by 10%, and much as I want to, I cannot argue with that data.
8pm: L and I watch some Cosmos. I learn that honeybees are 95% female and I get irrationally annoyed that every cartoon bee is depicted as male. Honey Nut Cheerio guy, I am looking at you!
Daily Total: $0
Day 5:
8am: I roll out of bed and put on a sweater so that my classmates cannot see my patterned PJs from Zoom. L and I did not get much sleep as we were discussing the events at the Capitol. L is an immigrant and the events of yesterday made me ashamed and embarrassed of my country. I am groggy and cranky for my small group session.
11am: I order two new pairs of jeans from Levi’s. I am definitely using shopping to distract from everything thats going on, but I don’t care. They are having a sale, and my favorite current pair have a hole by the crotch--how?! ($94.56).
2pm: I decide I will take Val on a walk to get me out of my moodiness and listen to another ‘This American Life’ podcast. The show’s celebrating its 25th anniversary and Ira Glass reflects on his radio abilities at 25. I wonder what it’ll feel like to look back at me at my current age, and what will have change.
4pm: Google Maps sends me an email about my 2020 timeline. Any other year I would love reflecting on all the different places I have been throughout the year, this year the email feels almost sarcastic. It is L and I’s 2-year anniversary tomorrow and I am not sure what we are going to do to celebrate. Finding ‘COVID-friendly’ winter date ideas is difficult and I feel out of creativity.
Daily Total: $94.56
Day 6:
9am: I have anatomy, but I cannot focus. I had a dream about my friend, Z, who died suddenly this past summer in a hit-and-run. I can never decide if these dreams are a welcomed comfort, or a horrible reminder. Usually, they occur when I am anxious, and I think the events of yesterday are to blame. I feel like crying but instead try to focus on the anatomy of cranial nerves.
3pm My sister’s text me about my mom’s birthday gift and if we should get her lululemon leggings, a handmade pie plate, or candles and what everyone is willing to spend. My mom does a ton for my sisters and I, and I hate being cheap for her birthday. We opt for all three and my older sister Venmo requests me my share ($90).
8pm: L and I order pizza and lava cakes from my favorite local joint ($38.50). We pick up a bottle of Rose (L pays). We watch Catch Me if You Can. I reflect on our two years together and how met on Tinder (yes, I am that millennial). It is crazy to think about all that had to go right for us to get here. I am feeling very lucky.
11pm: While L is taking Val out, I rush to put on lingerie and some makeup for a bit of anniversary cuteness. I look in the mirror and am surprised to see a confident little sex pixie starting back instead of the grungy COVID mole I have lately resembled. I make a mental note to do this more.
Daily Total: $128.50
Day 7:
10am: Bless the weekend for sleeping in. I use the time to scroll on Reddit, sip coffee, eat avocado toast and be general unproductive. After an hour or two of this, I do yoga.
1pm: We have a coupon for 2-for-1 coffee drinks at the shop in our apartment building and we decide to get warm drinks and take Val to the dog park (L pays).
3pm: I call my older sister as I fold laundry. She just started a new part-time job in the hospital and treats elderly COVID patients. Thankfully she is now vaccinated, which takes some of her, and my stress away. We discuss COVID, my dad, my stepmoms most recent dramatics, and politics—not the lightest itinerary, but we find ways to laugh about the chaos of it all.
7pm: L and I make momos for dinner. This is one of L’s favorite dishes but requires a lot of labor, so we make it together. Were out of chutney so I run to the store and grab tomatoes and peppers to make this as well ($4.12). We prep the dumplings and drink the rest of the wine.
Daily Total: $4.12
Weekly total: $267.20
I definitely spent more than usual this week. My mom’s gift and my shopping therapy were atypical expenses that made up the bulk of my spending this week. Reading this I sound a bit downer-y, but this week had a lot of unexpected national events which weighed on my mood and affected my spending. That being said, all were necessary purchases, and I am happy with them.

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Fascinating piece published today by NY Times Magazine on scammer call centers in India. The reporter even tracks one scammer down, travels to India and confronts him. Link and article below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

SoFi / IPOE growth catalyst overview: Extensive DD on SoFi's rocket boosters

SoFi is going public via merger with Chamath's IPOE spac. Here are SoFi catalysts to look forward to:

Cash deposits
SoFi is in talks to roll out cash deposits. A cash deposit solution will drive increased adoption of SoFi Money over accounts at brick-and-mortar banks. Cash deposits are a big deal because they are the primary pain point for online banking holdouts.

SoFi-as-a-Service partnerships
SoFi's consumer digital banking solution is ripe for white label expansion with major brands. The 2020 launch of Samsung Money by SoFi gives a glimpse of the massive potential.

Samsung Money by SoFi is the new way to grow your hard-earned cash, letting you save, spend, and earn -- all in one secure place. Now available on Samsung Pay.

Look for more SoFi-as-a-Service deals as consumer brands and dinosaur financial firms seek to catch up.
Not limited to banking services: In October, T. Rowe Price launched co-branded financial wellness offerings with SoFi.

SoFi Member Rewards aka SoFi Points
Currently in Early Access, SoFi's Member Rewards program is expected to roll out to everyone in 2021.

The SoFi Rewards program allows eligible members to earn points through various account activities, and then redeem those points as the member sees fit across multiple SoFi products.
You can redeem your SoFi Points into cash in your SoFi Money account, into Stock Bits in your SoFi Active Invest account, as an extra payment applied to your SoFi Personal Loan or SoFi Student Loan Refinance, or as a statement credit on your SoFi Credit Card--all from your phone.

Members earn SoFi Points by opening the SoFi app, using the credit card, and by use of other SoFi products. This program will increase daily app engagement and cross-buy of products.
Resources: SoFi Member Rewards, How can I earn SoFi Points?, Rewards FAQs.
Not to be confused with existing Member Benefits.

Galileo Financial Technologies
SoFi acquired Galileo for $1.2B in April 2020.
From the S-4:

Galileo provides the infrastructure to facilitate core customer-facing and back-end capabilities, such as account setup, account funding, direct deposit, authorizations and processing, payments functionality, and check account balance features. Additionally, Galileo provides vertical integration benefits with SoFi Money.
Since Galileo is a platform-based business model, we track the number of accounts, which is defined as an open account as of the reporting date. As of September 30, 2020, there were over 49 million total open accounts on the Galileo platform. We view total accounts as an important indicator of the number of Galileo’s customers' own customers who depend on the technology platform for a variety of products and services, including virtual card products, virtual wallets, peer-to-peer and bank-to-bank transfers, early paychecks, and real-time authorizations.

Galileo's clients include Robinhood, Chime, Monzo, Revolut, Dave, Klar, Greenlight, bitpay, MoneyLion, Remitly, Uala, Shipt, Tomo, TransferWise, and many more.
Galileo is a core infrastructure provider to the global neobank/Fintech industry. SoFi owns 100%.
SoFi is expanding their offers across Galileo's platform of 50M-and-growing accounts. Plug-and-play loans via API.
Keep up with Galileo using their Resources page.

Social Investing platform and Chamath as an Influencer
SoFi Invest has a "Social Investing" feature where you can view the holdings, watchlist and performance of other Members (if they opt-in). From there, you can make follow on investments/watches, discuss investments, and leave emojis.
Will Chamath join SoFi's social investing platform? Seems likely! He is the ideal Influencer investor to promote SoFi.
The Social Investing platform gives SoFi a means of growing SoFi Invest by bringing notable investors (and their communities) to SoFi. In a hint of things to come, CEO Noto says: "... we're on our way to introduce portfolios for those that you're following socially on our platform." This might mean one-tap portfolio duplication, or a form of MembeInfluencer managed portfolios.
This platform will increase trade volume by improving discovery and social proof.
Screenshots of the platform with Member names censored:
CEO Noto's top holdings, his recent activity, some engagement, and holding activity when merger news broke.
SoFi hiring favoring experience with social networks suggests that Social Investing will continue to evolve.

Bank charter
SoFi received preliminary approval for their banking charter and is on the way to full approval. The charter will enable SoFi to lower costs and compete more aggressively. SoFi hiring is seeking to fill key banking positions.

Targeting $1 Billion in 2021 revenue & full year profitability
SoFi's target looks well within reach. They reported ~$200MM in revenue and a return to profitability for Q3 2020.

... pulled in about $200 million in revenue in the third quarter and also generated positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and other exceptions, the first time it has done so since 2017, Noto wrote in a letter to shareholders last month.

per The Information.

Credit Card
Currently in Early Access, the SoFi Credit Card is expected to roll out to everyone in 2021. Credit Card FAQs.

Financial Services Productivity Loop
The "FSPL" is the core of SoFi's B2C products.
From the S-4:

Our strategy, what we refer to as the "Financial Services Productivity Loop", is centered around building trust and a lifetime relationship with our members, which we believe will help build a sustainable competitive advantage. In order to deliver on our strategy, we must develop best in class unit economics and best in class products that build trust and reliability between our members and our platform. When we do this on a member's first product, and they later consider using a second product, they are more likely to start with our platform and we have a higher chance that they will select one of our products to meet their other financial needs. This results in delivering more revenue per member with no second member acquisition costs, resulting in higher lifetime value per member. This also reinforces the benefits of our platform, which simplifies the entire financial ecosystem for our members, helping them get their money right. We are able to use the increased profits to further improve member benefits and product experience.

SoFi seeks to fulfill all of a Member's financial needs in one super app. Here is a FSPL visual.
How is it going? SoFi reports 24% overall cross-buy of products for Q3 20. They hit 69% for Home Loans. As SoFi's products mature and deploy, their cross-buy will continue to grow, while Member acquisition costs will decrease.

SoFi International Expansion
SoFi's international expansion was announced in Q2 2020 with the launch of SoFi Invest in Hong Kong.

Obviously, we put a lot of thought into where we chose to go with our first international foothold, and Hong Kong made sense to us for several reasons. As one of the financial capitals of Asia and a global financial center, it has a strong base of both novice and sophisticated investors that would benefit from the innovation we could bring to the market.

Members in HK can trade over 15,000 US and Hong Kong stocks for free using the SoFi Hong Kong app. This is one of SoFi's FSPL "top of the funnel" feeder products. Look for HK offerings to expand.
SoFi has long planned for international expansion. From targeting mortgages in Australia (old), expansion to Canada (old), Asia and Europe (old). SoFi is positioned for international deployment.

SoFi Stadium
SoFi Stadium will drive brand awareness and accelerate trust building. These are both key for growth in consumer finance.
Some major events are already lined up:

The state-of-the-art stadium re-imagines the fan experience and will host a variety of events year round including Super Bowl LVI in 2022, the College Football Championship Game in 2023, and the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Olympic Games in 2028.

Located in LA, this massive stadium is packed with benefits for SoFi Members, including line skipping, 10% cash back on concessions and merch, free bag checking, and an exclusive SoFi Member Lounge.
SoFi was planning to IPO at the end of 2022, which we can assume was in part due to the expected Super Bowl bump. More info at SoFi Stadium.

Member Experiences
SoFi has hosted free in-person Member Experiences for years. These include social events at Top Golf, escape rooms, bars/dining, theaters, sport events, and so on. As well as teaching events in line with SoFi's "Get Your Money Right!" ethos. There are big celebration events for Members who have paid off their student loans in full.
When the virus put a pause to in-person events, SoFi expanded their digital experiences. Over 20,000 Members registered for virtual SoFi events in 2020.
As virus re-openings expand, look for SoFi Stadium opportunities and Member Experiences to increase.

Apex Clearing
Recognize that name from your brokerage tax forms? SoFi has a ~17% stake in Apex Clearing, which provides brokerage clearing services, margin lending, compliance, transfers, and more.
From the S-4:

In December 2018, we purchased a 16.7% interest in Apex, which resulted in partial integration of the transaction clearing and asset custody functions integral to SoFi Invest. The investment has also enabled us to participate in earnings from Apex's customer base. As of September 30, 2020, our ownership interest in Apex was 16.8%.
Our equity method investment in Apex primarily benefits us in two ways: First, it facilitates better planning, coordination and integration in the technology stack for SoFi Invest, which requires clearing brokerage services. Second, we benefit from the income earned on providing clearing brokerage services to other institutions, and earn fees for margin lending and pay-for-order flow, the latter of which consists of arrangements whereby exchanges and market-makers pay for routing them certain orders.

Apex's clients include Ally Invest, M1, Wealthfront, Stash, Betterment, and others.
Learn about Apex Clearing's solutions.

Future acquisitions
Once SoFi's public listing via spac merger is complete, look for more strategic acquisitions. SoFi will be loaded with ~$3B in cash. Plus their newly public stock as acquisition currency.
Strategic targets may include more infrastructure providers and geographically appealing startups.
SoFi's entry into HK shows the global expansion model: Buy the local regulatory approvals overnight via a small startup, re-brand, and deploy SoFi's tech stack and talent.

ARK Invest?
SoFi has been on ARK's radar for years. It is assumed that ARK will build a position, which will blanket SoFi in ARK's halo. Possible buyers would be funds ARKF (Fintech), ARKW (Next Generation Internet), and perhaps the queen, ARKK.
Coverage at https://old.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/kta42h/ark_invest_interested_in_sofi_since_2018_buckle/

Possible tax solution & other additions
A couple months ago SoFi surveyed Members about a possible tax filing solution. Maybe it will launch for this tax filing season.
At the start of 2021, SoFi asked for input on which new features to prioritize. Such as portfolio analytics, more advanced spend tracking, and debt repayment budgeting. SoFi continues to iterate and improve their offerings with a focus on the Member.

More information SoFi's public listing via IPOE merger
SoFi Investor Presentation
IPOE / SoFi Introductory Presentation
S-4 filing with SEC
Chamath's 1-pager on the deal

A Few Ways to Make Money Online (13+)

Happy Two Year Anniversary Of Quadriga Collapse (CCAA Day)!

TLDR: Happy 2 year anniversary of Quadriga entering CCAA.

Happy 2 year anniversary of something completely preventable by Proof of Reserve. Not the “proof” where an overseas company registered to a UK shell address says the funds match the platform-provided customer list. Not a 5 years old “proof” where someone high up in Ripple declared backing as full. Actual proof of a real kind. An actual proof.

Happy 2 year anniversary of a joke of a process. A trustee that loses millions in funds. A legal counsel sending mail on an unrelated case. An official committee that never once asked the affected user community what they want. Shut down the only source of revenue, the easiest way to disburse payments, and charge $1,000/hr from victim funds.

Happy 2 year anniversary of not even knowing the simple fact of whether Gerald Cotten is dead or alive. India has a documented known history of death fraud. There are means, motive, and opportunity. We could settle the matter by just having a credible Canadian doctor take one quick look at that coffin. But no, apparently we just never will know.

People have told me what happened here isn’t a “real problem” and I should focus on the “real problems” of the world. How many affected users want to say what happened to them isn’t a real problem? Obviously you wouldn’t still be here if it wasn’t a real problem.

They say affected users need to “take responsibility” for their decisions, and somehow by their twisted logic, that means to walk away. Well, where I come from, “taking responsibility” means to take ownership of something and find an actual solution to fix the problem.

Another thing they say is to “accept” and to “move on”. How is what happened acceptable? And “move on” to what exactly? No one can change the past, of course, but these cryptocurrency exchange disasters keep happening over and over again and still happen.

And they say affected users have “the bankruptcy” to help them… Yeah, who here is happy with that solution? I mean, really, truly, feel that it’s the best solution. You’re going to feel like you’re made whole on what happened because you lost only 80-90%? Hooray?

By the Ontario Security Commission report, $150m of our funds is sitting in the hands of people who traded on Quadriga and withdrew extra money Gerald gave them from our savings. And these people have to gall to come here and “not your keys not your crypto”!

I have to ask what is wrong with some people. I get it that you “won” by unjustly enriching yourself at our expense, and it’s all our fault for storing on Quadriga. Even those of us who were trading at the wrong time or just storing fiat not even cryptocurrency.

We are building a movement to solve these “real problems” that we “accept” and “take responsibility” for. We will “move on” from “the bankruptcy” into a future we create, whether you help or not. Bitcoin is “the money of the people” and we are “the people”.

Here is how we are “solving” Quadriga with our Quadriga Initiative:

Prevention:

If exchange platforms don’t want to provide proof, we can’t force them, but we don’t have to use them either. We are building the first actual Proof of Reserves exchange in Canada through our partnership with TxQuick. Any customer can prove their balance is fully backed, periodically on a regular interval. And it won’t be a complicated proof either. None of this silliness with zkSnarks or third party audit validation processes or Merkle tree root nodes. It’s one hash (or copy paste to a website to do it for you), one search (Ctrl + F), one addition, and one look up on the actual blockchain, that proves without a doubt your crypto-assets are fully accounted for and backed without needing to trust any third party. For fiat, of course we need a third party report, by definition of what fiat is, but we are also looking at ways to have greater certainty here.
I have spent several months studying over 109 cases of cryptocurrency exchange hackings, scams, and frauds, and will be directly advising on the security practices. Ethan Burnside (TxQuick founder) also has extensive experience dating all the way back to 2012 when he ran the BTC Trading Corp without any hacking or fraud - all funds returned to users at the conclusion. In reality, it’s very simple to keep funds secure on a platform. Don’t store them online. Don’t store them in the control of a single person. If there is fraud in one transaction, then don’t ignore it and keep running the platform. That’s every case of customer loss in exchange history covered by 3 simple rules.
Regulators are making things worse.

Instead of trusting just one party, now you have to trust both the platform and the custodian, because either one can take your funds. Hopefully we can at least get a multi-sig with the platform and the custodian, instead of a system that just forces platforms to add counterparty risk.
Instead of giving platforms the flexibility to actually generate secure keys held/managed by real people (and helping to train those people), custodial key generation happens in a complex and obscure single supply chain anyone can happily modify if they only find a single point of failure.
Instead of creating a low-cost environment for platforms so Canadians will use Canadian platforms with oversight, massive compliance costs in a globally competitive market mean that many Canadians will use overseas platforms without any protections.
So far Canadian platforms have assurance of fund backing from a UK shell company headquartered overseas, no assurance that the customer list was complete, and trusted platforms openly hiding hacks. If platforms want to hide their blockchain assets for whatever nonsensical reasons, we at least need a system where actual credible third parties in Canada can provide assurances on the platforms safely and securely, with proof that all customers were included.
The insurance model is based on secret policies that nobody can look at, and third party insurance has never paid out a hack or fraud case in the whole history of exchanges. A better model is a multi-sig pool that platform operators pay into, owned and run by a consortium of platform operators, with the full authority to pay affected users directly depending on the situation. This permanent solution would take a lot of work to build.

Regulators just can’t seem to solve these problems properly. They won’t, especially without help. The industry needs leadership in this area. They need an organization that is focused on this one specific key problem. And it needs to be an actual organization - I alone can only do so much by making Reddit posts, websites articles, and sending emails.

Recovery:

As people like to keep saying, “the money is gone”. But “money” is nothing more than a “social credit” you can exchange for utility (products/services) from businesses. Businesses make a profit in every single purchase. This “profit margin” - profit businesses make from the sale - is obtainable with the right negotiation without lowering their bottom line. The fact is that we have a large group who can perform that negotiation, and the fact is that businesses regularly and fairly eagerly give different rates to different groups. They use their profits to do things for marketing to appeal to particular groups or support particular causes. When we tap into that, we tap into billions of dollars.
Some may have heard of Bitfinex, which was an exchange hacked in 2016. They were devastated because they stored all the client money online, and lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. (And yes, they had a “custodian” in their setup.) While many platforms in that situation would have folded up and declared bankruptcy, leaving their customers waiting years to get a small portion of their funds back, they didn’t. They figured out what was lost, subtracted it off evenly and proportionately, and made it available for immediate withdrawal.
And they didn’t stop there. They created their own “social credit”, a token called the BFX token, and they gave it for free to all their customers in proportion to the USD value of what they lost. Then, they used the operating profits (aka profit margin) to repay each of these tokens back to the lost USD value. Within 7 months, they’d paid back every penny that was lost. Bitfinex isn’t the only platform to solve a hack in this way. NiceHash also finished last November recovering and fully repaying from a similar size hacking case. (Their money was stored in the hands of a single person.)
We are planning a similar model here as the basis for our best effort recovery. Working in partnership with the TxQuick cryptocurrency exchange, which has just recently finally got approval from BCSC to launch, and now only needs funding from accredited investors to hook up fiat banking, we will be creating our own “social credit” and giving it out completely free to affected users for proven loss claims, and then using the TxQuick platform revenue to slowly reimburse the losses over time. So anyone who uses the platform is slowly helping to reimburse the losses of affected users and simultaneously helping to reduce fraud on cryptocurrency exchange platforms.
However, for affected users who are customers, it’s much more efficient to pay directly in tokens. For example,100% payable in tokens on CCAA and bankruptcy anniversaries, and 50% normally, just by holding the tokens in their account. It means affected users effectively automatically pay a lower fee for trading until they recover what they lost. This applies to market taking - market making is already completely free on TxQuick. Use the savings for whatever you want or buy more bitcoin. TxQuick features advanced trading types, a Binance-compatible API, and advanced multi-factor authentication.
In November 2019 we confirmed that there was interest from other businesses as well to support affected users by offering exclusive discounts that accept tokens. HosterBox, Trofeo Auto Coatings, and Coin Trade Ledger are all small Canadian businesses who have agreed to help create a recovery by letting affected users take advantage of special discounts we’ll be setting up. HosterBox even floated the idea of offering some free packages for affected users fully paid by tokens. (With web hosting, the margins are extremely large, so they can afford to do this fairly easily.) Since then, we’ve been slowly building up a list and network of other businesses who may also be interested in helping out as well.
Affected users will have the option (though by no means any obligation) to use or recommend these businesses, spending their “social credit” tokens to save money until they recover the full value of what they lost. We will put together a list, and expand it over time. And, we will organize it as a leaderboard. The business which has done the most “recovery” will get the top spot, and others will be ranked in a similar way. It gives strong recognition to these small businesses for their incredible generosity and strong support of making right what happened here to all affected users. And it recognizes if they choose to offer an even better discount or promotion for a limited time - permanent recognition of that! Eventually, we can grow this website into a full-fledged online marketplace specializing in small businesses that not just accept payment in cryptocurrency, but provide a discount and support fraud reduction at the same time. Cryptocurrency holders have very few options to find such businesses.
I could go into all the ways in which a business can use this for an effective promotion, and the fundamentals of how businesses work to create value, but I believe that everyone fundamentally understands that businesses create value in an economy. And by working with businesses, we can recreate the actual total value of what was lost here in Quadriga, in a way which isn’t just “moving losses around” to other people.
This will, of course, take a lot of work to complete. The total sum is some $200m - $300m or more that’s been lost, which for an average Canadian salary is 5000-9000 man years. By comparison, my estimation is that we can build the similar value by a small group working in a focused manner over the next decade - that’s roughly 100x more efficient. I’ve been researching and laying it out in an 80 page business plan for the past 2 years, and had a number of others also review it, so at this point, I’m fairly confident this can work and scale to the size it needs to recover the full sum.
How do we fund the operating costs of the organization? Some affected users would rather not wait for our recovery or buy at these businesses, lost a huge amount, or downright just think our project will fail. They’d rather liquidate their tokens for a low price. On the other hand, anyone using the platform would like to save money on their trading, or at any of the other businesses. Each token is redeemable for $1, so if they pay 2 cents/token (this was the going market rate during the early part of Bitfinex recovery), and 5 to 25 cents/token to support the cause, they save 73 to 93 cents per token. Buy 100 tokens = save $73 to $93.
In addition to funding the project, the proposed 5 to 25 cent per token fee keeps outsiders from stupidly stockpiling tons of tokens to speculate with, unless their goal is to support our project, in which case they have no issue with the fee as a donation. To be clear, these tokens have no cash value and all recovery is best effort. (They are not a security based on the Howey Test. They are given for free, you should not expect “profit” from a best effort promotion-based idea, the recovery is run by the community in an open inclusive manner, and the token itself is a commodity provided based on a specific defined historic event. Tokens only have to fail one “prong” of the Howey test to not be securities, and these arguably fail all 4 prongs.)
It’s important this be overseen by affected users - not a corporation with a profit focus. For that reason, we are not for profit (which any organization can be if their main goal is something other than profit) and working towards a 501C3 non-profit status - covered as “relief of the distressed”, “advancement of education”, “lessening the burdens of government”, “lessening neighborhood tensions”, and “combating community deterioration”. For the moment, we are simply a group of affected users with a vision to make this situation and similar situations better, and prevent them happening. However, if we get 501C3 status, in addition to the savings that consumers could get from buying the tokens, they could also get a tax receipt for the per token fee as contribution to our cause. Affected users also likely wouldn't pay any capital gains tax when redeeming tokens at businesses, as those work as discounts. (However, the TxQuick best effort redemption to cash is likely a capital gain.)
Our organization/group will work in close partnership with TxQuick initially to launch this recovery, but it’s fully separate. Even though Ethan Burnside is an affected user, TxQuick is looking after their shareholders as a profitable company, using this as a marketing promotion to get a lot of people to sign up for their platform. Quadriga Initiative is run by and advocates for affected users. Our mandate is to make sure the recovery is successful and Quadriga never repeats. If we complete the recovery for Quadriga, we can use our resources, connections, and model to assist other notable fraud cases. It's very important to have this two-organization structure to make sure that the recovery proceeds to conclusion. (Plus, affected users voted on this in our past survey.)
If you have a loss in Quadriga, you can register a free pre-claim by providing your first name, QuadrigaCX client ID, and an email address (forwarder is fine) at https://quadrigainitiative.com/. Note that this is not affiliated with the bankruptcy (see the notice from Miller Thompson here). We will email you further steps for how to sign up and file the full claim once TxQuick comes online, which is still probably a few months away. You can review our privacy policy here, and the privacy policy of TxQuick here. Every part of our recovery is completely free and optional for affected users. It does not impact your bankruptcy claim.

Justice:

If affected users have interest in pushing for exhumation or otherwise advocating particular causes that are of net benefit to our community as a whole, we are happy to work with them to bring this to fruition and connect them with others. Anything which doesn't break the law and is productive to advance the cause of affected users is open for discussion.
The Official Committee, while composed of affected users, has failed to engage with the community (and in fact they’ve now disconnected fully from the Telegram group as well). By contrast, we plan for our group to consult with the community at every stage and our meetings are open for affected users to attend. We regularly seek the input and inclusion of all affected users who will engage in respectful and constructive discussion.
For the moment, until we have a more permanent meeting arrangement, you can come and chat with us most Thursday evenings by participating in the CryptOasis meetup which is run by Jason. This is a Zoom chat, but you are free to chat with audio only if you prefer. CryptOasis is not exclusive to Quadriga Initiative, and is open to chat about other topics as well.
We are looking to build a diverse team with a lot of unique backgrounds and viewpoints. If you would like a more active role, you can join our counsel (providing casual advice periodically) or council (meeting regularly to discuss the project). In addition to the ability to help out a ton, make a real impact on the blockchain space, and meet all kinds of great people, volunteers will have “first dibs” at board membership of our non-profit and any future roles in the organization as we need to fill them. You can attend the meetup or send us an email if you’re interested in helping further.
Feel free to join our subreddit /QuadrigaInitiative.

Thanks very much! Please feel free to leave any comments or questions below!

My California ballot, 2020

Every election year, the Bay Area rationalists put together a slate to help each other vote. This year the coronavirus made it hard to come together as a whole community, so I'm drawing off the work of the Valinor group house in Oakland in particular. When I say "we" in this post, I mean the ~10 residents of Valinor - though this is my ballot and not theirs, I disagreed with them at a few points, and all views expressed are ultimately my own. I've changed a few things after the fact based on readers' arguments, so this does not perfectly reflect my actual votes.
This will be more relevant to Oaklanders and Californians than to anyone else. We are mostly center-left-libertarianish YIMBYs, and we trust endorsements from YIMBY Action and aligned local politicians like London Breed, Buffy Wicks, and Libby Schaaf. The less you agree with that political package, the less relevant this will probably be for you.
We put a few hours into this and weren't able to give every issue the attention and seriousness it deserved. For a more complete voting guide for the same area, see this one by Zachary Reiss-Davis, and the recommendations by YIMBY Action and SPUR.

California Ballot Measures

California propositions are a way for voters to go over the legislature's head and pass their own laws. Direct democracy is good in principle, but sometimes voters don't know what they're doing, and legislators can't repeal or amend a proposition that goes badly. Most famously, Proposition 13 was a Reagan-era initiative which hard-coded low property taxes into the state's constitution. This is good for homeowners, bad for everyone else (the state just makes up the difference with really high income taxes), and overall creates a weird system of epicycles and perverse incentives.
Hard-coding a law against the wishes of the legislature is a big deal, so we start with a strong (but overcome-able) presumption of "no" on propositions. The exception is propositions requested by the legislature to overturn previous propositions, or for other arcane reasons that require the legislature to request propositions.
Prop 14: Yes?
Prop 14 issues $5 billion in state bonds and gives the money to stem cell research.
This is pretty weird - the state government already has a research budget, and presumably already decided how much money to give stem cells compared to other things. There is not some kind of catastrophic stem-cell related emergency that requires the electorate to rise up and demand the state invent a completely new budgeting process just to fund stem cell research.
I think what's going on is - in 2004, stem cell therapy was new and super-exciting. The Bush administration banned federal funding for religious reasons, this was in the middle of the atheism-religion culture wars, and so liberal California decided to strike a blow for scientific freedom. They passed Prop 71, which gave $3 billion to stem cell research and made California a world leader in the developing field. After 15 years, they've run through the Prop 71 money and need more, so they figured they'd try the same thing again. But the Prop 71 stem cell research was mostly based on hype, which has since receded.
I originally urged voting "NO" on this, based on these considerations. I got push back from a stem cell scientist in the comments, but of course stem cell scientists would support this. But I also heard from some people at the Open Philanthropy Project that they have researched this super-in-depth, talked to various experts, and believe that the specific stem cell research being funded here is incredibly promising, so promising that we should set aside our presumption against ballot box funding and support it. On the strength of Open Phil's recommendation, I am changing my recommendation to yes.
Prop 15: Yes
This weakens Prop 13. Prop 13 originally restricted property taxes on a variety of properties. This repeals it for commercial and industrial properties worth more than $3 million, ie big business. I don't think we need a hard-coded super-law saying we can't tax big businesses.
Our presumption is to support propositions repealing other propositions, and this seems like an especially good one. Support. But see this discussion for the alternative perspective.
Prop 16: No
This is the nationally-newsworthy one that repeals the part of the California constitution banning racial discrimination and makes affirmative action legal again.
You all know my opinion on this sort of thing. Maybe I'm too emotional on this issue, but California institutions already seem pretty Orwellian. If you want to get a tenure track position at some California universities, you have to write a "diversity oath" where you swear that you support diversity and talk about everything you've done to promote it; applicants' oaths get graded, and only the ones that seem most heartfelt are allowed to enter the normal process where anyone even considers how good a professor or researcher you are. How many of history's most important thinkers would have had their careers snuffed out if this process had existed in their own time? I don't trust the sort of people who come up with this kind of thing enough to remove constitutional safeguards against them. Even if you're okay with discriminating for college admissions (the most likely use case), you would also have to be okay with the next form of legalized racial discrimination people will think up, and the one after that.
Possibly there's an argument for accelerationism here - the more obvious it is that college admissions aren't based on merit, the less employers will obsess over who has degrees from what college, and the more chance we have of breaking the stranglehold that $200K-tuition colleges and their lacrosse-obsessed admissions committees currently have on public life. But I would have to be more confident in this argument before actually voting based on it.
The California constitution's current ban on discrimination was itself passed by proposition in the 1996 election. That means there is no particular presumption against this, and maybe a presumption for it. I nevertheless oppose.
Prop 17: Yes
Felons are currently banned from voting in California. This proposition says they are allowed to vote after they complete their prison term. I'm not sure it's ethical or democratic to prevent people from voting just because they committed a felony sometime long ago. If you complete a prison term, you've paid your debt to society and should be in the clear. Also, I expect these people will have interesting things to say about prison reform once they're allowed to have a voice.
Although our presumption is usually to oppose propositions amending the constitution, this overcomes that presumption. Amending the constitution to give disenfranchised people the right to vote seems in keeping with the inherent solemnity of the constitutional amendment process, and isn't the kind of thing we hate where you legislate every little change in tax policy directly into the constitution just because you can. Support.
Prop 18: Yes
This gives 17 year-olds the right to vote in primaries if they will be adults during the associated general election. Sure, sounds reasonable, whatever.
Although our presumption is usually blah blah blah see above.
Prop 19: Yes?
This changes Prop 13 tax regulations (you may be noticing a theme). Currently, the government cannot raise your property taxes very much while you live in a house, even if the house increases in value. Once you sell the house to someone else, the government can raise the property taxes to market value. According to the current Prop 13 law, a child inheriting a house from their parents does not count as a sale; so if your grandparents lived in a house and leave it to you when they die, you will still pay however much tax your grandparents did (maybe an amount corresponding to the value of the home 50 years ago). Part A of this proposition says you can only do this for one property at a time. If you inherit twenty houses from your super-rich parents, you will have to pay normal-person taxes on nineteen of them.
Part B says that various sympathetic groups of people (elderly, disabled, disaster victims) can switch houses and keep their low taxes. Suppose you are an elderly person who raised a family in a big house in the city. Now your family is gone/dead and you want to move to a smaller house in a quiet suburb. If you got your current house 40 years ago, Prop 13 guarantees you will be taxed at its 40-years-ago value, ie very low, but if you get a new house it will be taxed at its current level, ie very high, and maybe you won't be able to afford it. This is a market inefficiency, since it incentivizes a single person to live in a very large house instead of giving it to others who could make better use of the space, so it effectively exacerbates the housing shortage. Current law already mostly addresses this by saying people in these sympathetic groups can move once. This law increases it to three times.
Last election cycle's Prop 5 was just Part B of this current proposition. It was sponsored by real estate companies, who are naturally very excited about solving market inefficiencies that prevent people from selling their houses and buying new ones. Lots of people opposed it because they were annoyed that it gave even more rights to homeowners chasing unnaturally low taxes. I abstained, because I couldn't decide how to balance the market-inefficiency-solving (good!) with the unfair-privilege-expanding (bad!). Overall voters rejected it soundly.
This proposition is the real estate industry trying again. They argue Part B will still solve a market inefficiency (and make them lots of money), but Part A will roll back another kind of unfair tax privilege we give homeowners, so the balance is more obviously good. The state budget people say that overall it will cause the state to have more money, so the real estate industry's claim that this tightens tax loopholes on net seems fair.
We had some disagreements on how to apply our presumption against ballot propositions, leading to the rest of us voting no on this. My position is that this should be considered only an amendment to an existing constitutional amendment, not a new one. So I see it as having a weaker presumption against it, and as managing to overcome that presumption. I support.
Prop 20: No
This makes California's criminal justice system stricter in various ways.
Existing law says nonviolent criminals can get out early on parole, but violent criminals can't. There is some controversy over the current list of which crimes are violent - for example, it seems like some rape and sexual offenses don't always qualify. Part A of this proposition replaces the old, supposedly-too-short list of 23 violent crimes with a new list of 51 violent crimes. The new list includes classics like "murder" and "assault", but also more questionable choices like "sodomy" and "mayhem". I'm going to give these people the benefit of the doubt and assume that sodomy here means nonconsensual violent sodomy, and that mayhem is a real crime of some sort somehow. I didn't get far enough into the weeds to determine whether this list is better or worse than status quo.
Part B of this proposition redefines some misdemeanors and "wobblers" (crimes that can be either misdemeanor or felony) as definitely felonies. These include firearm theft, car theft, and (most notably), shoplifting things between $250 and $950 (I think more than $950 is already a felony).
Part C says more kinds of criminals have to submit DNA samples to the state database.
This is a response to various past ballot propositions that have made California's criminal justice system more lenient in various ways, under the banner of "criminal justice reform" or "prison reform". It seems to be a joint effort between victim's rights groups who are angry that their abusers/assailants/whatever are getting out of prison too quickly, and retail groups who are angry that people keep shoplifting from them and mostly getting away with it. I have a few patients in retail, and they broadly back this up - they say people steal from them all the time, it really hurts their already-tenuous ability to stay in business, they see it happening, but they feel like nobody cares and there's nothing they can legally do about it. It sounds really unpleasant.
On the other hand, spending years in prison because you shoplifted a $250 fleece or something also sounds really unpleasant, California prisons are already overcrowded, and it seems especially worth worrying about this in the middle of a coronavirus epidemic.
My philosophy of criminal justice (which I think is supported by the evidence, but I'm too lazy to find and cite it right now) is that punishment should be swift, certain, and minor. A world where every shoplifter gets caught and immediately has to spend three days in jail is safer and fairer than one where 1% of shoplifters get caught and have to spend three years there. I don't think reclassifying minor shoplifting crimes as felonies is in the spirit of that, and I have a strong presumption against anything that increases the prison population.
I'm not sure how this fits into the presumption against ballot initiatives, since it's responding to previous initiatives, but still, oppose. See here for a somewhat different perspective from someone with retail experience.
Prop 21: No
The Costa-Hawkins Act was a 1995 California state law that limited cities' ability to pass rent control laws (though some types of rent control are still legal and common). Ever since then there have been various propositions trying to overturn it, most recently last cycle's failed Proposition 10. This time around there's Proposition 21, which is supposedly different because it exempts properties under 15 years old.
I am against rent control, because 95% of economists say it is bad for the poor and reduces the availability of affordable housing. But I'm also against the state government telling cities what they can and can't do. If you're a libertarian who's against regulation, how do you think about the electorate trying to regulate the legislature's trying to regulate cities' trying to regulate landlords' ability to set prices? Do you just count whether the sentence contains the word "regulate" an even or odd number of times? Last year I decided it was a tie and abstained. This year it's still a tie, but in honor of our general presumption against ballot initiatives, I'll just go with no.
Prop 22: Yes?
Last year California passed AB5, a law which reclassified most gig workers as employees. The intended targets were Uber and Lyft, who famously classify their drivers as gig workers rather than employees, exempting them from lots of labor regulations. The unintended targets were everyone else; for example, the state may have accidentally banned freelance journalism, photography, etc.
Uber and Lyft made some cosmetic changes and claimed the law didn't apply to them; California said it definitely did; it escalated to a point where Uber and Lyft threatened to suspend service in California; and finally it got tied up in court, with Uber and Lyft allowed to continue employing gig workers until a final decision comes down sometime next year. Prop 22 is backed by Uber and Lyft, and lets them ignore AB5.
I really hate AB5. It enshrines all the worst parts of the modern economy - inflexibility, you have to have exactly one employer who controls your entire life, health insurance is tied to employment, nobody can choose their own hours or working conditions. It throws independent professionals under the bus in favor of everyone having to be a corporate drone of the exact same government-approved kind.
And there's the libertarian aspect - it bans people from making mutually beneficial contracts on whatever terms they want, in favor of having to do things the exact government-approved way. If you look at any literature from before the 1970s, it shows that almost any able-bodied person who wanted a job could get one within a few days just by asking around and walking into the first place that wanted them. I don't know all the changes that led to our current dystopia of endless resumes, applications, and disappointments, but I suspect it was the government transforming employment from "sure, let this person do some work for you for a while" to "oh, you employed this person? now you have two thousand different obligations to them that you can never get out of". The government has tried to create a faux social services net funded by people's employers, but it turns out businesses are happy to have workers but less happy to have social service dependees. The solution is for the government to fund its own damn social services and stop hanging more and more things on the employer-employee relationship.
But Uber and Lyft are great. Some of my mentally-ill patients who could never get an official employee job at a fast food place or something now have jobs with Uber and Lyft that they can feel really proud of and use to support themselves or supplement support from the government or their family. Anyone who's taken an Uber or Lyft knows that they're the first destination for new immigrants who get excluded from traditional employment. Or you've probably also met the single mothers who say they were never able to have a job before because they needed to be home at X, Y, and Z time for child care, but now that they're gig workers who can choose their own hours it's let them get back into the workforce and help support their families. It really feels like the same sort of situation you read about in pre-1970 books - a place where anyone, even if they're poor or disadvantaged or foreign, can get a job and earn an honest living for themselves in a way that the rest of the economy has completely dropped the ball on. I want to support these people, and the only polling I know of suggests most ride share drivers support Prop 22.
And Uber and Lyft have also really earned my trust and respect. Five years ago I worked in a clinic that wasn't on any of the public bus routes. Some of my poorer patients didn't have cars, and it would take them hours to get to my office, and sometimes they would miss some crucial public transportation step and not be able to make their appointments at all. Sometimes if they were desperate they would take a taxi, which would charge them through the nose and take its sweet time getting there. This was right when Uber and Lyft were expanding to Michigan, I was usually the first person to tell them about it, and it changed some of these people's lives. It's really easy for privileged people who own their own transportation to dismiss ride-sharing as a luxury, but if you don't have a car, you used to have severely limited mobility. Now you can get anywhere in town for a quick $5 Uber ride.
In a world of quickly-closing opportunities, Uber and Lyft are this rare bright spot, where uncredentialled blue-collar workers excluded from most positions can get flexible jobs with whatever hours they want, and where poor people who were previously locked out of most of the world can get anywhere they need to be for cheap. So of course California is trying to destroy them. It's the most California thing ever to California.
So I should support something like Prop 22. But the proposition itself is pretty bad. Uber and Lyft carve out exceptions for themselves while leaving most of AB 5 intact. This is a pretty naked power grab by ride share companies that does nothing to help all the other groups affected by this bill, and some commenters are suspicious they'll find ways to use it to quash competition (though I'm not clear how). Although it solves part of the immediate problem and appropriately humiliates the California legislature, it's also a cynical ploy by Uber and Lyft to trick Californians into giving them what they want while leaving everyone else to rot. If it passes, the legislature might give up and repeal AB5, but the proposition might also just placate the only powerful AB5 opponents (ride shares), making any further opposition to AB5 impossible. Maybe the most important thing a yes vote here could do would be prevent other states from trying the same thing.
Presumption should probably be against, although I feel like letting the voters explicitly veto an unpopular law is less inappropriate than random interest groups making random new regulations by ballot box. I did vote yes on this, but after reading the comments here I'm no longer sure of anything, except that I hate everyone involved and would totally understand either choice. See here for another argument against.
Prop 23: No
This proposition places extra regulations on dialysis clinics, for example forces them to have a doctor or NP present at all times. I am generally suspicious of regulations to increase cost of and decrease ability to provide medical services, and a lot of these "doctor has to be present" things end with some heavily-credentialed doctor drawing a salary to do crossword puzzles while the nurses who actually know what's going on do the real work.
A previous version of this guide assumed this was a cash grab by medical guilds, but I owe them an apology - the California doctor's associations are against this - which actually says a lot, since they stand to profit. Patient associations and nurses' associations also oppose. It's unclear who does support this - all I can find is a big service employees' union, but I'm not sure what their interest is.
And there's our presumption against ballot initiatives again. California already has medical regulators, and they didn't see fit to enact this. The federal government has regulators and they didn't see fit to enact this. Why should dialysis regulations go before 40 million Californians who probably have only the vaguest idea what a kidney is or why having one fail is bad? Oppose.
Prop 24: No
This "amends consumer privacy laws" to "permit consumers to prevent businesses from sharing personal information".
I have a strong presumption against consumer privacy laws after the disasters that were HIPAA and GDPR. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the privacy watchdog I trust most, doesn't support this one. Oppose.
Prop 25: Yes!
This replaces California's money bail system with a system based on trying to predict flight risk, like Washington DC successfully uses. Money bail systems keep lots of innocent poor people in jail (and some guilty poor people in jail longer than necessary). It also causes some people who would otherwise be found innocent to plea bargain in order to get out of jail before various disasters befall their job or family. Flight risk prediction systems have been shown to avoid these problems without causing a noticeable uptick in criminals who escape justice. See this blog post I previously wrote on the topic. Some people I know in the effective altruism movement are pretty in support of this.
The legislature has already passed this, but the bail industry somehow got it on the ballot instead. This proposition affirms the decision of the legislature, rather than overturning it, and so the presumption should be in favor, which is convenient because I'm in favor of this. I put an exclamation point at the end of this one because I think it's probably the most important measure on this year's ballot; if you only take my advice on one of these, make it this.

Oakland/Alameda County Ballot Measures

Measure Y: No
This issues $735 million in bonds for schools. Oakland's school district already spends above the national and state average per student, and has a reputation for mismanaging funds. These funds would mostly go to repairing administrative buildings, the least sympathetic category of school budgetary problem. Also, I kind of want to destroy the entire modern educational system for complicated reasons. Although I realize rejecting Oakland school bonds is at best a minor victory in this crusade, it's probably better than supporting them.
Measure QQ: Yes
This lets children age 16 and up vote for school-related officials; currently it's 18 and up. As with Proposition 17, I support letting incarcerated people vote in ways that might let them do something about the system incarcerating them, so yes. Also, who names these things? QQ? Really?
Measure RR: Abstain?
Currently fines for ordinance and code violations are capped at $1000; this measure lets the city increase that. This affects both minor "street crimes" like littering and graffiti, and more building-y crimes like not keeping things up to code.
I previously said "no", on the grounds that I am against "tough-on-crime" style bills that try to increase fines poor people who already don't have the money to pay existing fines. But ZRD's guide argues this is supposed to punish big polluters who can't be effectively punished under the current system. I can't find anything in the proposition itself to indicate this, so until I learn more I'm going to abstain.
Measure S1: Yes
How come this one has a 1 after it? How come the measures go Y, QQ, RR, and S1, in that order? Is the Oakland city council trying to communicate with us in some kind of deranged code? Anyway, this slightly rearranges the way an independent monitoring body monitors Oakland's police force.
The city recently had a close call with defunding the police, but as far as I know this isn't really related to that effort. This is related to a law passed a few years ago, during the Ferguson fallout, saying there would be an independent commission monitoring the police. Apparently the law was poorly specified and confusing, and this measure is supposed to be a common-sense clarification of how it works. It is "supported by all eight city council members", and my usual sites that list arguments pro- and con- are unable to find anyone willing to write the con side of this one. Maybe if we ever cracked the code of Oakland ballot numbers we would get the secret case against Measure S1. Until then, support.
Measure V: Yes
This renews an existing utility tax on unincorporated areas, to fund the utilities of unincorporated areas. This seems fair and everyone I check seems to support it, so sure, whatever.
Measure W: Yes
This increases sales tax by 0.5% to fund social services for sympathetic groups, especially homeless people. There are a lot of homeless people in Oakland, they clearly need help, and studies show supporting homeless people tends to save money in the long run (though if this were true, wouldn't this measure be a tax cut rather than a tax increase? Hmmmmmm). Oakland has no particular record of catastrophically mismanaging pro-homeless funds. And I've already rejected other tax increases this election, so I feel like in order to maintain the cosmic balance I should support this one. Support.

National Races

US President: Biden
I'm against Trump for the same reasons I was last time, plus everything that's happened in the past four years - of which the worst of a bad lot was the bungled response to the coronavirus. Trump also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, which should be disqualifying in itself even aside from everything else.
California isn't a swing state, so I considered voting Jo Jorgenson as a gesture symbolizing I hate the two-party system. But I decided instead to vote Biden as a gesture symbolizing I really hate Donald Trump. I'll vote Libertarian on some irrelevant downballot race to make up for it.
13th Congressional District Representative: Lee
Barbara Lee is the incumbent. We disagree with her on many things, but in 2001 she was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against invading Afghanistan. We appreciate this kind of prescience and willingness to defy the mob, so we have instituted a presumption that she gets our vote for life unless there is some super-strong counterbalancing consideration.
Her opponent, Nikka Piterman, doesn't seem very serious - unsurprising since serious people don't run as Republicans in the Bay. But let's take a moment to appreciate his website, including proposals to split California into two states, implement the metric system, and create a spaceport in the center of San Francisco Bay. Also, he's pretty hot. If I batted for the other side and didn't already have a committed voting relationship with Barbara Lee, who knows?

State And Local Races

15th State Assembly District: Wicks
Buffy Wicks is the Democrat and the incumbent (which in the Bay Area are kind of the same thing). She's an Obama admin veteran, and a YIMBY advocate who briefly made national news for appearing postpartum with her newborn to vote on housing on the California Assembly floor after they wouldn't let her vote remotely. We continue to support her and appreciate her vampire-slaying work.
Sara Brink (independent) is the challenger. Her webpage begins "This race does not matter", which is a bold opening move. It says that "We live in a trash democracy and a bullshit two party system" so she has abandoned all hope of winning the race, and instead of voting for her we should start working on prepping to resist an upcoming wave of violent white nationalist repression. I appreciate the reminder that this is still the Bay Area and I still live here for some reason, but overall I pick the friendly Democrat with the cute baby.
9th State Senate District: Dluzak?
Nancy Skinner (D) is the incumbent. She gets good scores from YIMBY Action and we generally like her. She is broadly popular and a shoo-in to win re-election.
Her challenger Jamie Dluzak is a Libertarian; the GOP didn't even bother with this one. His website is unreadably bad, and boasts of deliberately having the world's ugliest political bumper sticker, because "they say that to try to fail is the underpinnings of success" (who says that? why?). He is a little unclear on what policies he supports, though his site suggests he is broadly in favor of black people, and I assume he is libertarian in some way.
I said I would symbolically vote Libertarian in a meaningless down-ballot race, and this one is my chance, so Dluzak it is! Your preferences may differ.
Oakland City Council Member At Large: 1 Sidebotham, 2 Kaplan, 3 Johnson
Rebecca Kaplan is the incumbent. YIMBY groups have mixed feelings about her, not exactly denouncing her but liking her opponents better. She's also a pretty strong opponent of Uber and Lyft. And I get the impression she is some kind of nemesis of Mayor Libby Schaaf, who we like. Meh.
Derreck Johnson superficially looks better. He has full support from YIMBY groups, is endorsed by the local politicians we like (Libby Schaaf, London Breed, Buffy Wicks), has the (extremely generous) support of Uber and Lyft, and boasts an inspiring story as a small business owner who founded a beloved local restaurant, hired formerly incarcerated people to work there, and navigated it through the COVID crisis. Unfortunately, a recent expose reveals that he does not in fact own the restaurant. He lost it in 2017 for financial malfeasance issues, including taking some of the restaurant's money for himself. All his claims to have owned the restaurant after that time have been lies. Seems really sketchy.
Nancy Sidebotham is an outsider with an extremely 90s website. It's unclear what she supports besides being outraged, a goal she has accomplished reliably over a sixty year career of being vaguely adjacent to civic life. She could charitably be described as a protest candidate, but luckily for her, I really feel like protesting these people!
My ranked choice voting is 1 Sidebotham, 2 Kaplan, 3 Johnson.
Oakland City Council District I: 1 Kalb, 2 Walton, 3 Ngo
Dan Kalb is the incumbent. I start out with vaguely negative feelings to him because he sends me junk mail flyers, but the rest of us have vaguely positive feelings because he was instrumental in getting bike lanes on our local roads. According to his website, Oakland Magazine named him the “most effective member of the eight-person Council", and East Bay Express named him "Good Government Politician Of The Year". He has endorsements from Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin.
Steph Walton is the main challenger, but fails to distinguish herself. Her website says she likes good things, like equity and is against bad things, like homelessness, but her proposed policies and plans seem like the same vaguely leftie ideas everyone around here has about everything. She does hit all the right notes about housing, and has endorsements from Buffy Wicks and YIMBY Action.
Tri Ngo seems like a protest candidate, though his website is actually quite good. His most unusual issue seems to be government transparency, including "an online voting system that enables residents to propose and vote on council measures...with kiosks in post offices and libraries".
Some of us are voting Walton based on her endorsements, but I don't feel like she was able to overcome my presumption for voting for Kalb as an unusually successful and widely-liked incumbent.
Alameda County Transit Director At-Large: Peeples
The Mercury News suggests reelecting all current transit directors, because they seem to be doing a good job, and also the coronavirus has been a disaster for public transit and they need experienced hands to guide them through financially. So I'll start with a presumption of reelecting incumbents unless I see a good reason otherwise.
The incumbent here is H.E. Christian Peeples. I want to take a second to appreciate his amazing name and its combined monarchist/theocrat/populist vibe. I can't find a campaign website, but all the newspapers endorse him, say he has done a good job, call him a financial wizard. Articles about him use the word "competent" like it's going out of style, and praise his role in an apparently revolutionary environmental initiative to run buses off fuel cells.
Dollene Jones is running to become the first transit worker to serve on the transit board - she's a former bus driver. This is her sixth attempt. She is inspiring and sympathetic, but East Bay Times warns that she sees "district issues strictly from a labor perspective and her role, if elected, as an advocate for the drivers". Given that the Bay needs better public transportation and the unions are part of the challenge that has to be overcome, I'm ruling her out.
Victoria Fierce is the most interesting candidate, and has a great website with cute graphics and excitingly wonky plans to improve transit in various ways. She's a YIMBY, and she's clearly thought a lot about the transit system and identified the most important and solvable problems, like the lack of comprehensible transit maps, and the need for a good Trans-Bay service. She seems probably closest to me in terms of tribal affiliation, and she might be the only person on this whole ballot who I predict I would like in a "would enjoy a conversation with her" way as opposed to a "has an inspiring backstory" way. On the other hand, she describes herself as a "radical socialist" and seems to think part of a public transit's department job is destroying individualism. In general her oeuvre makes me kind of worried that if she ever gained office she would identify me as a counterrevolutionary and arrange to have me get hit by a public bus, or whatever else power-mad transit directors do.
Like the people of 1930s Spain, Oakland transit voters are faced with a choice between monarchist-theocratic-populism and radical socialism. In this case, I don't think the challengers manage to overcome my presumption in favor of the incumbent, so I'm going with Peeples.
Alameda County Transit Director, Ward 2: Harper
Harper is the boring incumbent who nobody has anything particularly against. Daily Californian says he "has served on the AC Transit Board fairly well for 16 years".
Jean Walsh is the challenger. Her website supports the usual things about how she wants transit to be better, but fails to differentiate herself from Standard Candidate #X in any particular way.
I don't see anything to overcome my presumption in favor of the incumbent, so Harper.
I’m reaching the Reddit character limit, so I’ve stuck BART director, school board, Superior Court Judge, and City Attorney in a followup comment.

get paid real money online surveys video

Get paid to take online surveys for money. Sounds like everybody’s dream job! No wonder it’s so popular. When it comes to free ways to make money online and work from home jobs, paid surveys are usually one of the first opportunities most of us consider.. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, that dream turns into a nightmare! Best Paid Survey Sites for Money. If you are looking for survey sites that really pay, here are 6 of them to sign up and get paid. To maximize your earnings you can sign up all of them. If you have spare time, doing more surveys from many sites can dramatically increase your revenue. In my opinion, the best way to make money online is with paid surveys for PayPal money. Not only are they quick and easy, but basically anyone can do real surveys that pay PayPal money and start earning money straight away. When it comes to the best survey sites with PayPal, not all sites are created equally. Paid online surveys are not the only way to make money with Swagbucks. The company awards its members SBs to shop online, search the web, and watch videos. You can start redeeming your earnings as soon as you reach 160 points. The more SBs you accumulate, the higher the value of the gift card you can redeem. Taking online surveys is an amazing way to earn money online.But make sure you spend time only on legitimate online surveys for cash.. Lets discuss about 15 best paid online surveys available on internet. Learning Points . Why are we getting paid for online surveys? 15 legitimate online survey websites in internet Are paid online surveys legit? There are legit online survey sites out there that will reward you with real money and gift cards just for answering surveys. We list 15 top options right here. How much money can you get from paid online surveys? Paid online surveys won’t pay you a lot per survey, so it’s really a long-term game. Make Money online with Get-Paid.com to earn easy money online by filling out offers such as paid surveys. Get-Paid (formerly GPTreasure) offers many ways to earn money online while working at home. Want to Make Money from Home? GetPaidSurveys.com gives you the Best Online Paid Surveys. See our Top 10 Paid Surveys list. Real User Reviews & Ratings! 7 Paid Online Survey Sites to Earn Extra Money You can make some extra cash with online surveys, but it's difficult to earn sizable amounts. By Geoff Williams , Contributor Dec. 14, 2020 How much money do you get paid to take surveys online? Ultimately, it’s a side hustle that can fit into most people’s schedules, but the compensation isn’t usually incredibly high. Sure, there are some that pay $50, $100, $200, or even more, but they are incredibly rare.

get paid real money online surveys top

8 LEGITIMATE ONLINE SURVEY SITES THAT ACTUALLY PAY CASH ...

SURVEY VOICES LINK: https://www.mb102.com/lnk.asp?o=15661&c=918277&a=464272&k=F03180737D5F895C16ED02D8AC984B4D&l=16615Today I'm talking about Paid Surveys T... 💰 My #1 Recommendation For Making Money Online Click Here Now ️ ️ ️ http://LifeWithoutLimits.co_____Top 3 Paid S... 20 Best Legit Paid Survey Sites That Pay Through PayPal 2021Looking for the best survey websites!? Of course, you are!You won’t get rich completing paid surv... How to avoid paid survey scams online plus few top legitimatesites to join and get paid to take surveyshttp://www.meleciaathome.com/2015/08/top-10-paid-surve... ★★The Secret For EARNING UP TO $100,000+ From Home★★CLICK HERE ️ ️ ️ https://success.lunchbreaklaunch.com/startStep-By-Step... So Simple Anyone Can Do ... http://www.surveyjet.net ... for a very long time I was fooled by widely available legitimate paid surveys reviews that supposed to give me access to survey ... #paidsurveys # PaidSurveysonlineI'm sure we have all heard that you can make money by doing online surveys, but does this actually work? I decided to find ou... DON'T FORGET TO VERIFY YOUR EMAIL FOR EASY POINTS! 📩🔥Swagbucks: https://swagbucks.7eer.net/learnhow ($5 BONUS!)🔥Vindale Research: https://learnhowgroup.co... My #1 way of Making Money Online:https://www.funnelfromhome.com/earn500Ryan Hildreth (@Ryan Hildreth) explains exactly how to get paid to like videos ($1.50 ... Click here to work with me http://6figuresormore.com SUBSCRIBE HERE http://bit.ly/SubscribeHereJayBrownHey my friend thank you for coming by my video. ...

Best Surveys Sites - Get Paid for Online Surveys - Surveys

get paid real money online surveys

get paid real money online surveys - win

A Few Ways to Make Money Online (13+)

NYT article on scammers.

The Problem with Student Loan Forgiveness(And What Should Be Done)

I am 24 years old, live off savings and go to Medical School (preclinical) in Wisconsin

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

SoFi / IPOE growth catalyst overview: Extensive DD on SoFi's rocket boosters

A Few Ways to Make Money Online (13+)

Happy Two Year Anniversary Of Quadriga Collapse (CCAA Day)!

Prevention:

Recovery:

Justice:

My California ballot, 2020

California Ballot Measures

Oakland/Alameda County Ballot Measures

National Races

State And Local Races

get paid real money online surveys video

get paid real money online surveys top

8 LEGITIMATE ONLINE SURVEY SITES THAT ACTUALLY PAY CASH ...