Tag: fintech

You Are Getting Screwed

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

The most successful marketing campaign I ever created promised to save people money.

It did the opposite.

Today, America’s cellphone carriers are using the same marketing trick on YOU.

I knew it was evil when my partner in the boutique marketing agency we ran introduced the campaign idea to our credit union client. It would cost our target market, mainly low-income Latino airline workers, way more than they were currently paying on their car loans.* I designed a comp (a visual of the projected campaign) and my partner presented it. Campaign tagline: “Get lower monthly car payments or get $250 cash!”

“You’ll never have to pay a penny on the campaign promise,” my partner promised our client. “Just extend the timeline of the loan to lower your borrowers’ monthly rates,” my partner explained. “And while it’ll take them longer to pay off their loans, it’s additional interest for you, and a nice little boost in profits,” she assured the CEO.

The client loved the idea and gave the campaign her go-ahead.

The campaign garnered a 58% response rate. Even better, 38% of those who saw any part of the campaign, whether it be email, display posters, info pamphlets, counter cards…etc., converted.

Fast forward 30+ years to last week. I needed a new phone, my old cell so cracked I couldn’t read texts anymore. Hate AT&T which I’d been with since I got my own landline at 14 (way before cellphones). If you’ve ever been with them, you’ll know why I hate AT&T. Decided to go with Verizon after our daughter signed up for $45 a month including unlimited data. Our AT&T bill was $184 monthly for two phones, and mine has NO internet connection on it. Plus, Verizon had a FREE iPhone with sign up.

My husband and I visited Verizon last week to get FREE iPhones, and a cheaper phone plan similar to our daughter’s.

Except the iPhone was NOT actually FREE.

There was tax on the phone for Verizon’s inflated value of $999. And the cheapest plan we could get for just our two ‘FREE’ iPhones was over $79 each monthly, or $158 a month before taxes. And the new iPhones would be ‘LOCKED’ to Verizon, meaning if we wanted to go to another carrier, Verizon makes it impossible to unlock your phone from them if you get it ‘FREE’ through them.

Clearly Verizon, and all the other phone carriers are scamming us with their ‘FREE’ phone offers.

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile…etc., phone carriers are doing to most of us exactly what my biz partner and I did to the low-income Latino airline workers that belonged to our credit union client. It was evil then.* It’s evil now.

How to Avoid Getting Screwed by your Cellphone Carrier

Our daughter got her $45 monthly rate from Verizon, including taxes, because a week earlier we’d given her the latest iPhone, purchased at an Apple store for her college graduation. We bought it UNLOCKED, so it did not belong to any carrier. She was able to choose the cheapest phone plan with Verizon because she did not have to PAY for their ‘FREE’ [locked] iPhone that she could not take to another carrier if she was unhappy with Verizon.

So, instead of going with Verizon’s ‘FREE’ phone offer, my husband and I went looking for UNLOCKED cellphones. We didn’t want to spend close to double for iPhones, so we tried to find inexpensive Androids. Except we couldn’t find hardly any, except on Amazon, which has destroyed retail, so I don’t shop on it anymore.

Went to Best Buy. The store was vacant of customers and their shelves empty of most products. The salesman suggested we try Amazon.

Who else besides Amazon has the largest selection of phones available? The phone carriers, since (according to the sales rep at Verizon), most everyone gets their cellphones from carriers these days, “because of our great FREE offers!”

Verizon offered us $79 per phone monthly with their ‘FREE’ iPhone, and we had to pay the tax on Verizon’s inflated value for the iPhones which I could get from Apple for a hundred less, with a larger display, and unlocked. Further, Verizon wanted a 3-yr contract at the higher rate to “cover the FREE phone.”

In every possible way, Verizon’s ‘FREE’ iPhone deal is a SCAM, and most everyone is buying into them with any phone carrier these days.

Do you even know how long your contract is with your new ‘FREE’ phone that you cannot take with you to a new carrier? Most people don’t. They blindly, robotically pay their bills.

Let’s bring into this portrait of corporate corruption AUTO-PAY. When I first heard of it, I said to my husband, “What kind of idiot would agree to something like that?” Paying vendors for services automatically through your credit card allows these companies to make their screw-ups YOUR PROBLEM while they just keep billing you. No lights? PG&E will still AUTO-charge you. No cable? Xfinity will still AUTO-charge you. Problem with your bill? They will still charge you, and now it’s on YOU to get them to give you your money back. And good luck with that!

The old way, I simply would not pay them until they cleared up the issue. Not paying them gave them incentive to fix it.

AUTO-PAY also lets these corps raise their rates at will, and so what if your cable bill used to be $140 for the year, and now you’re paying $284 a month. You hardly even notice the slow creep up adding $10 — $30 to your credit card every few months.

My daughter swears by the ‘convenience’ of these financial apps. Well, honey, convenience is hella costly!

So is buying into Verizon’s (or any other phone carriers’) marketing! Like my campaign to the Latino airline workers in the late 1990s, you can bet Verizon’s conversion rates are great from their ‘FREE’ iPhone campaigns with every Apple upgrade.

—

*If you’re thinking: “Maybe some people need lower monthly rates and don’t mind paying more in the long run.”

Well, in case you didn’t know, extended debt keeps low-income people low-income for life.

The 5% Factor in Finance

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I had a conversation with my former financial advisor when the markets were crashing back in ’08. I asked him to give me an estimate, his best, ostensibly educated guess when the market might turn around or at least stabilize. He assured me it would be soon. The credit default scandal had already been exposed. Real estate foreclosures had been assessed and the losses factored into financial projections. The fact is, he offered with conviction, in any industry one had to account for a certain amount of corruption. Maybe 5% of the people in any given field were evil. The evil had now been weeded out and the markets would bounce back to its mean of 8 to 10% growth or better annually soon, he’d promised.

Turns out, evil abounds in the financial industry. From Michael Arougheti (Ares), $85 million in 2024, to Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), $39 million to Varun Krishna (Rocket), $25.89 million, and their corporate cronies with eight figure bonuses, these bank execs and mortgage brokers horde properties, creating our current housing shortage turning us into a renters nation, and control the markets at their whim with risky investments (which they call ‘financial products’) for personal gain. My advisor had to be grossly low on his 5% estimate of evil in finance.

According to forensic psychologist and author Robert Hare, it is possible, even likely, that the percentage of evil is greater in the financial industry than most any other field. Money attracts greedy people. Those who choose a career pursuing money, instead of building, inventing, engineering, teaching, are generally looking for what they can get from society instead of what they can give to it. In Snakes in Suits, Mr. Hare claims at least 10% of all those in finance are psychopaths.

The 5% (or more) who callously exploit the rest of us is what makes the free-market system they support a myth. That 5% evil controls 95% of the financial markets of the world. The enormous scale of capital they play with has proven to collapse economies, robbing millions of their life savings, their jobs, their homes.

Most of us put our earnings in the bank or the market and hope our savings will grow. We depend on those in charge of most everyone’s money to know what they’re doing and manage the money we entrust to them wisely. Most of us don’t have the time or inclination for in-depth study and monitoring of the markets. Even if we did, it is rarely possible to get an intimate and transparent view inside most corporations. We rely on our government to monitor and avoid financial catastrophes. The ‘08 crash is an example of what happens when they don’t. The Trump administration is another, while he and his 5% — bankers; brokers, energy and tech execs — sets up our economy to profit themselves at the cost of 95% of the rest of us.

A ‘free market’ system strives to maintain very few restrictions, touting supply and demand will regulate economics. And though this is a lovely idea, like communism, it doesn’t work in the real world. The economy collapses when demand is only from the [wealthy] 1% of the population that can afford anything. Public companies with no limits on growth, minimal regulations, limited liability, no accountability, and lack of transparency virtually invite exploitation by the few, but none the less formidable percentage of evil. Our ‘free market’ invariably becomes controlled by a small minority of wealthy shareholders who represent only their own interests. This corrupts the entire society by shifting the balance of power to a handful of narcissists, if not out and out psychopaths, as Robert Hare claims.

Republicans and conservatives scream socialism if the government regulates the markets beyond ‘protection of property and against force or fraud.’ But everyone pays the price for the 5% that continually redefine the term ‘fraud.’ The 5% evil controlling the financial industry continues to take ridiculous risks and impose absurdly high costs and interest for excessive yields to line their pockets. And the fact is, it IS socialism when taxpayers are forced to bail out banks and brokers who were, and are still indifferent to the suffering they cause — the very definition of ‘Psychopath.’

We will never be able to ‘weed out’ evil from humanity. A certain percentage of our population will always be narcissists, care exclusively about their own welfare over the society in which they live.

Regulations on our financial industry must be imposed and upheld to keep evil in-check and limit the damage the 5% will surely cause again and again. We are more than willing to put sanctions on countries that support terrorism. If we are truly ‘by the people, of the people, and for the people’ of this nation, we must sanction the evil in our system as well.