They were working an old IRS scam. Googling phone scams you could find out what people were hip to, so he invented his own messages. The women quickly copied him when they saw his results.
“You are hereby notified that we need to speak with you or your attorney immediately regarding an ongoing investigation. In the event we do not speak with you in our office today, we will document that you waived your rights to counsel and submit your file to the state.”
“This telephone number is linked to a questionable financial transaction that is now under investigation. It is possible that your name and social security number could be involved. I need you to call me or one of my associates immediately.”
He would make two hundred calls by lunch. Rarely, if ever, talking with anyone on the initial call. The calls were local but came from scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes. He’d eat lunch, take a solid forty-five minutes and peruse shit on the Internet. The women hammered the phones nonstop trying to get someone, skipping lunch or eating at their cubicles between calls. You had to scare people with the messages you left. They had to call you.
Early afternoon the callbacks started in earnest. Sometimes he couldn’t keep up, the women gladly handling his overflow. Mary Stewart took the inbound calls. From the number on caller ID she would know which agent had placed the call, confirm the caller’s name and social security number and transfer the call to him if it was his, or if he wasn’t on another call. He’d reconfirm the social security number with the caller. Knowing their social security numbers was like holding their babies out a window ten stories over a sidewalk.
They purchased call lists from payday lenders, storefront or online. It was the afraid callers with sketchy credit histories who gave up their card numbers. The standard charge was payback of the fictitious loan for $400 and a $35 processing fee. He went for more. Sometimes he’d say the loan was for $1,500 or $2,000 and they’d want to mail him a check, he’d tell them if they gave him a credit card number he would waive the processing fee and come down $300 to settle. Sometimes with the bigger amounts the card number wouldn’t go through, and Mary Stewart or Mr. Anderson would send it through for less, whatever they could get.
The women were using his scripts, but they didn’t have his deep, resonant voice. They had weird accents. Sometimes they would go out into the empty warehouse together, Denise Meyers, Susan Jones, Ann Johnson and Mary Stewart. Susan Jones and Ann Johnson smoked. They would converse in a foreign language. After five minutes of his standing there awkwardly with his hands buried in his pockets, Mary Stewart smiled apologetically and gave abridged translations. When Mary would translate, the other women would stop talking in the strange language, looking at him by turns. The next time he followed them out into the empty warehouse they spoke English.
They could hear each other. They had earbuds and weren’t right on top of each other, but the offices were tight, formerly the administrative offices of a defunct propane gas concern. The women would threaten the callers if the callers weren’t taking the bait or were confrontational, “get a good lawyer,” “I’m forwarding this information to the three credit reporting agencies.” They took the confrontational calls personally. You couldn’t. If there wasn’t any money in it get off the call quickly, hang up if necessary.
Denise Meyers was the most egregious. If Denise Meyers called a blocked number, she would continue to call using all twenty-nine scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes and leave her message, or her version of one of his messages. She would call the same cell number from all thirty scrambled lines until she was completely blocked, each time leaving increasingly menacing versions of the original message. If she knew where the owner of the blocked cell phone number worked she would call that person’s work and leave messages with a receptionist that the owner of the blocked cell number was facing a grand jury indictment for embezzlement. She would look up family members and call them, telling the family members their brother, sister, son or daughter was facing fraud charges. He would listen to her being awful in her weird accent and disaffected tone. He’d listen to her and want to fuck her. Fuck her hard.
