Greg's Corner

Robocalls could be a health hazard!

Yesterday, we talked about how robocalls have become such a nuisance in our day to day lives and what the government is doing to try to stop them. Normally, we wouldn’t be talking about them again so soon as we like to give our readers some variety. However, news recently came out about how robocalls could potentially put lives in danger. As we previously stated, many people have taken to ignoring most phone calls if they don’t recognize the number. But what if you weren’t able to ignore any incoming calls? That’s exactly what happened to one prominent hospital last year.

On April 30th of 2018, Tufts Medical Center in Boston received an onslaught of robocalls to their facility. The hospital received thousands of robocalls that tied up their phone lines for hours. The calls were in Mandarin Chinese threatening deportation if the person receiving the call did not divulge their personal information. This is a common scam perpetrated on new residents of our country and Tufts happens to be in Boston’s Chinatown. As you’ve probably guessed, facilities like Tufts can’t exactly take their phones off the hook or let them go unanswered. To do so would be putting their patients’ lives in jeopardy. Now imagine a busy hospital where not only do the staff have to treat patients but also have to deal with constantly ringing phones that are nothing but scam calls.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKKGDwmsYN8%5D

While there has yet to be any evidence that these robocalls to hospitals have impacted anyone’s treatment negatively, they definitely have the potential to cause enough chaos to do so. If a large hospital was responding to a major disaster and came under attack from one of these robocall outbreaks it could seriously hamper their efforts to treat gravely injured patients.

Unfortunately, most of these robocalls come from overseas where it would be hard to track and prosecute the perpetrators. Hopefully, the government and the phone carriers can come up with a plan to put an end to robocalls once and for all before they become dangerous.